While he spoke, Hartover roamed up and down the room restlessly, working off his excitement. Now he came and, sitting down on the arm of my chair, laid his hand gently on my shoulder. ‘Dear old friend, forgive me,’ he said. ‘I ought to have known better. It was only for an instant I distrusted you; but I was so knocked about. The road to freedom—for it is freedom, through all this shame and misery, this horror of crime and violence, I recognise that—has been very frightful to tread. Nothing can ever look quite the same again. I am new born, not only to man’s estate, but to a new vision and understanding of what I may and will, God helping me—I don’t shy at a little bit of piety for once!—do with my life. Only the pains of that new birth have been as the pains of hell, dear old man.’ And here I think the tears came, for the boy’s hand went up hastily to his eyes, and he turned away his face—from which I opined it would be some time before he and youth parted company, even yet! ‘Gad!’ he said, ‘I believe I should be thankful never to set eyes on a petticoat again, as long as I live; but,’ with a rather weary little laugh, ‘I suppose the misogynist attitude of mind won’t last, whatever else does! Look here, Brownlow, how soon can you be ready to go up to Hover with me? I hear the grouse promise well this season, and I’ll be hanged if Colonel Jack puts a ha’porth of shot into a solitary one of them. And, oh! dear me, I want to get away from London, away to the clean wind and the open moors and—forget.’ I took no reading party to North Wales that summer, but rode Warcop’s horses and tramped the fells with Hartover instead. And when I went back to Cambridge at the beginning of the October term, the boy—having sent in his papers on his twenty-first birthday—went back with me, thus carrying out his old wish of passing at least one year at the university. And Marsigli never came to trial, but died by his own hand in gaol, to Lady Longmoor’s immense relief, as I imagine; but to Detective Inspector Lavender’s immense disgust and discouragement of belief in his luck. ‘The authorities may ignore it, sir,’ he said to me; ‘but I can’t. That affair hammered more nails into the coffin of my professional reputation, or ought to have done so if every man had his deserts, than I care to count.’ CHAPTER XLI. Little further remains to be told. The story of my life, that is of its more interesting and critical portion, which I began to write in the long summer mornings when hay harvest kept more than half the parish busy in the fields, has occupied my leisure hours until now, when the first December snow showers fling a glittering mantle about royal Hover, rising there across the valley amid the domes and spires of the mighty pines.