He came upon a night in August, three weeks precisely after the departure of Count Odin for Bukharest. Of the people of the Hall he knew little save that which common gossip and the tittle-tattle of the newspapers had taught him; nor was his the temperament to be troubled over-much by the strange hallucination which had attended his journey from Moretown to the Manor. That which some people would have called an apparition, he attributed to fatigue and the hour of the night; and while an uneasy feeling that this simple account of it might not ultimately satisfy him was not to be lightly dismissed, the hospitalities of the great house and the work to which he had been called there quickly dispelled the impression of it, and left him with some shame that he had been such an easy victim to a vulgar delusion. For the rest, curiosity remained the only intruder between him and the work he had been summoned to do. The Lady Evelyn! Where had he seen her before? How came it that her face was so familiar to him? Every hour that he lived at the Hall quickened this impression of familiarity. Her very voice could make him start, as though one whom he knew well were speaking to him. Her stately movements, her gestures, tormented his memory as though inciting it to recall forgotten scenes for him. At the luncheon table, upon the second day, he made bold to tell her of his immovable idea. "We have met somewhere, Lady Evelyn," he said, "I cannot tell where; but it was in some such house as this--in the gardens of such a house. And that is odd, for to my knowledge I was never in a Tudor house before. Now, say that I am dreaming it; that it is just one of those foolish ideas which come to one in sleep and are remembered when waking. It could hardly be anything else, of course." Evelyn flushed crimson while he was speaking; but she retained her composure sufficiently to declare that she had no recollection of such an occasion. "We rarely go from here," she said evasively. "I cannot recollect visiting any Tudor house in England--you see so many, Mr. Ord. It would be natural to have such an idea, I think." "Oh, perfectly and perhaps foolish. Our brains play us strange tricks, and, often enough, the wildest of them have the least meaning. I know a man in Paris who dreamed three nights running that he would be thrown out of a motorcar on his way to Monte Carlo. He put off the visit in consequence and was knocked down next day by a cab in the Rue Quatre Septembre. I don't mean to say that he was killed, but he had a nasty fall, and that was the price he paid for dreaming. I try to dismiss these things as soon as they come to me. Here's a case in point. You and I clearly have never met--unless it were in London," he added, with another keen glance at her.