‘But you must; your salvation may depend on it!’ he insisted almost sternly. ‘You don’t know what I am.’ ‘Then, sir, I promise,’ she replied. ‘Now leave me to myself, please, and I’ll go indoors and manage matters.’ He turned the horse and drove away, but only for a little distance. Out of sight he pulled rein suddenly. ‘Only to go back and propose it to her, and she’d come!’ he murmured. He stood up in the phaeton, and by this means he could see over the hedge. Margery still sat listlessly in the same place; there was not a lovelier flower in the field. ‘No,’ he said; ‘no, no—never!’ He reseated himself, and the wheels sped lightly back over the soft dust to Mount Lodge. Meanwhile Margery had not moved. If the Baron could dissimulate on the side of severity she could dissimulate on the side of calm. He did not know what had been veiled by the quiet promise to manage matters indoors. Rising at length she first turned away from the house; and, by-and-by, having apparently forgotten till then that she carried it in her hand, she opened the case, and looked at the locket. This seemed to give her courage. She turned, set her face towards the dairy in good earnest, and though her heart faltered when the gates came in sight, she kept on and drew near the door. On the threshold she stood listening. The house was silent. Decorations were visible in the passage, and also the carefully swept and sanded path to the gate, which she was to have trodden as a bride; but the sparrows hopped over it as if it were abandoned; and all appeared to have been checked at its climacteric, like a clock stopped on the strike. Till this moment of confronting the suspended animation of the scene she had not realized the full shock of the convulsion which her disappearance must have caused. It is quite certain—apart from her own repeated assurances to that effect in later years—that in hastening off that morning to her sudden engagement, Margery had not counted the cost of such an enterprise; while a dim notion that she might get back again in time for the ceremony, if the message meant nothing serious, should also be mentioned in her favour. But, upon the whole, she had obeyed the call with an unreasoning obedience worthy of a disciple in primitive times. A conviction that the Baron’s life might depend upon her presence—for she had by this time divined the tragical event she had interrupted on the foggy morning—took from her all will to judge and consider calmly. The simple affairs of her and hers seemed nothing beside the possibility of harm to him. A well-known step moved on the sanded floor within, and she went forward. That she saw her father’s face before her, just within the door, can hardly be said: it was rather Reproach and Rage in a human mask.