She looked at him without a trace of emotion or constraint in her large, quiet face, and their eyes met for a moment in that brief, fixed, baffling fashion that seems to prove that mankind is after all but a dumb masked creature saddled with the vain illusion of speech. ‘And now that I’ve eased my conscience,’ said the old lady, pulling down her veil, ‘I must beg pardon for intruding at such an hour of the evening. And may I have your arm down those dreadful steps? Really, Mr Lawford, judging from the houses they erect for us, the builders must have a very peculiar notion of mankind. Is the fly still there? I expressly told the man to wait, and what I am going to do if—!’ ‘He’s there,’ Lawford reassured her, craning his neck in their slow progress to catch a peep into the quiet road. And like a flock of birds scared by a chance comer at their feeding in some deserted field, a whirring cloud of memories swept softly up in his mind—memories whose import he made no effort to discover. None the less, the leisurely descent became in their company something of a real experience even in such a brimming week. ‘I hope, some day, you will really tell me your dream?’ he said, pushing the old lady’s silk skirts in after her as she slowly climbed into the carriage. ‘Ah, my dear Lawford, when you are my age,’ she called back to him, groping her way into the rather musty gloom, ‘you’ll dream such dreams for yourself. Life’s not what’s just the fashion. And there are queerer things to be seen and heard just quietly in one’s solitude than this busy life gives us time to discover. But as for my mystifying Bewley acquaintance—I confess I cannot make head or tail of him.’ ‘Was he,’ said Lawford rather vaguely, looking up into the dim white face that with its plumes filled nearly the whole carriage window, ‘was his face very unpleasing?’ She raised a gloved hand. ‘It has haunted me, haunted me, Mr Lawford; its—its conflict! Poor fellow; I hope, I do hope, he faced his trouble out. But I shall never see him again.’ He squeezed the trembling, kindly old hand. ‘I bet, Miss Sinnet,’ he said earnestly, ‘even your having _thought_ kindly of the poor beggar eased his mind—whoever he may have been. I assure you, assure you of that.’ ‘Ay, but I did more than _think_,’ replied the old lady with a chuckle that might have seemed even a little derisive if it had not been so profoundly magnanimous. He watched the old black fly roll slowly off, and still smiling at Miss Sinnet’s inscrutable finesse went back into the house. ‘And now, my friend,’ he said, addressing peacefully the thronging darkness, ‘the time’s nearly up for me to go too.’ He had made up his mind. Or, rather, it seemed as if in the unregarded silences of this last long talk his mind had made up itself. Only among impossibilities had he the shadow of a choice. In this old haunted house, amid this shallow turmoil no practicable clue could show itself of a way out. He would go away for a while.