“I love you so much,” she said with simple dignity, “that it gives me great pain to see you disgrace yourself. Go to your room now, as quickly and as quietly as you can.” Rees, overwhelmed with shame, and feeling for a moment as if the wind of an angel’s wing had wafted away the mists of evil which had for months been creeping ever more closely round him, crept away, without so much as daring again to meet her eyes, to his own room. CHAPTER XII. Next morning Rees rose with a violent headache and a feeling that the whole world was out of joint. He was ashamed to meet Deborah, ashamed to meet his mother, and not in the mood to bear with Hervey’s sententiousness. So he had a hurried breakfast alone, in a ground floor apartment, which was still, in memory of past glories, called the “housekeeper’s room,” and slipping out by the back garden door to avoid the rest of the household, he started for a walk by himself, full of remorse, full of great resolutions, and a determination that never again--no, never, for the sake of gold or for any other cause, would he consort with the satyr-like librarian, who seemed able, by a look, a word, to throw a taint upon all things fair and good. Rees crossed the bridge, and sauntered along the banks of the river, instinctively choosing the direction which brought him face to face with the grey-walled ruins which had lately been the centre of all his dreams. At the first sight of the castle, in the hot morning sun, he felt that he hated it, connected as it was with all the disturbing forces which had been agitating his formerly happy life. But as he walked he began to feel that, whichever way he wished to look, those broken towers, those huge piles of rough stone, were the one point in the landscape to which his eyes must turn. They fascinated him: he watched the new and fantastic shapes which the jagged walls formed from every fresh bend in the river’s banks with a sense that they now formed part of his life, and if that crumbling ruin were to disappear from the face of the earth the world would be empty for him. He began to live over again, in spite of himself, the adventure of the night before; the descent of the two flights of steps, the cliff, the groping along the passage, the glassy stare of the dead man’s eyes. Then suddenly he was struck with the idea that down under the ground, perhaps at that very moment underneath his feet, the dead messenger of a dead king was still keeping watch and ward over his master’s gold. Out here in the staring sunshine, with the hot haze dancing over the narrow river, and the clang of the workmen’s hammers coming to his ears from the shipbuilders’ yards, all those experiences of the darkness seemed like a dream to him.