Nor were my discoveries the only profit I had brought back from my journey. A firmer confidence in myself; a more obdurate determination; a certain newly realised sense of humour--these were to be included in the gains. I felt a reinvigorated sense of mastery, a larger grasp of the world; I felt an insolent sense of security in Luck’s favouritism; I felt somehow like a weasel that watches a rickyard from cover. How I could make the rats squeal and run if once I elected to show myself in the open! I was in a very detestable humour, that is the truth. On the morning after my return I took a long stroll round about the skirts of the estate, beginning with the “bare ruined choirs” of the woodlands, and coming round by Hags Lane, where the hawthorns had been stripped stark by the wrecking winds. Winter, with all its moan and mystery, shivered upon the air; the sheep on the pastures seemed to crop, with haunted ears pricked to it; there was a stiffness as of dread expectation over all the land. To the many figures which danced and crowded into my mind throughout that lonely tramp, the figure of the girl whom I had hated and scorned would sometimes, my scorn despite, add itself. It even became, all at once, a persistent demon, thrusting itself forward, pleading for a monopoly of my attention. An impudent, outrageous claim. What was the creature to me, or I to her, in this play of “leading parts”? My concern was with the real actors and actresses--not with the skipping figurante, who came to fill the interludes of scene-shifting. This Ira, good Lord, of the Hebraic name! Was she a “watcher,” as her name implied? Perhaps she was; perhaps--all in an instant the thought struck me: what if she were Lady Skene’s spy--the agent of a guilty conscience, deputed to discover the reasons for my withdrawal from its control? The thought was so sudden, so ineffable, that it made me gasp. She had been down to my lodge during my absence, that I knew. The signs of her woman’s handiwork there were unmistakable. I will even admit that my instant recognition of them had given me an odd little thrill, compound of triumph and something like pity. That she should have continued true to her principles of expiation, though I was not there to witness, had gone some little way towards forcing from me a grudging belief in her sincerity. But now!--if there was all the time a method in her humility! On the thought, the memory of my altar came into my mind. Had I been already fool enough, in my boasted emancipation, to give my case away to a spy? I hurried, with all speed, back to my den--and there was the girl standing before the picture. She had on a blue-sprigged apron with a tucker. A broom was in her hand, and her furs and jacket were thrown upon a chair. She turned round instantly upon hearing me, and her face flew pink with some sudden emotion. “Richard!” she said, pointing to the caricature. “What on earth is the meaning of that?”