He led the way out of the library again, and along a corridor still more deserted and dismal than the hall. It ended at a locked and barred door which he unfastened with some effort. “This is the way into the ruins,” he explained. “You can pass out from them into a path that leads through the home meadows up to the Moorfield Farm. It’s a public footpath, and if anyone sees you they’ll think you’ve been exploring the ruins from outside.” Nothing could have suited better with my plans. I knew the path, and knew that at a certain point another diverged from it and led through a well-remembered wood to the barn where I had asked Violet Bredwardine to meet me. I passed out into the Castle grounds and clambered over the crumbling walls and fallen stones till I found myself on the path. And now every step became tragical. I was treading on the ashes of the fire in which two hearts had been scorched and branded with a mark that could never be effaced. The grass beside the narrow footway seemed to be stained with blood. I drew my breath in pain as I mounted the slope towards the lonely little farm-house in which I had passed the most glorious and the most miserable hours of my life. When I came to the gate into the wood, I stopped and leant upon it panting, and hardly able to proceed. The wood was haunted by ghosts more dreadful to me than any spirits of the dead; the ghosts of passion and of pain, the ghosts of love and hatred, of that most terrible of all hatred which is born of love betrayed. I shuddered as I thrust open the gate and stepped beneath the trees. A sombre fir drooped like a weeping willow over one spot where the way was crossed by a trickling spring that plunged and disappeared down a steep gully choked with brambles and dark ferns. But there was a worse point than that to pass. A tall beech sent out its roots on to the path, and on the smooth rind of its trunk were cut two initial letters entwined--a V and B. The very knife that had scored them there lay in my pocket; I had never parted with it. What madness had tempted me to blazon our secret to the inquisitive country-side? I had used one precaution: I had cut the proclamation of our love on the side of the trunk that was hidden from the public way. Now, when I reached the tree, I forced a passage through the undergrowth to see how time and weather had dealt with that vain memorial. A bitter shock awaited me. Every vestige of the monogram had been destroyed by deep cuts and slashes in the bark. Only a confused web of scars and scratches marked the place. The tree’s wounds seemed to reproduce the wounds upon two hearts.