“Strange is it not?” began David once more, “that I should remember so clearly every word she ever said to me, though my poor brain was so sick at the time! But indeed it seems to me as if, until the moment when first a mantle of gorgeous dream enwrapt me round and then a blank, a blessed blank fell on me and in it I lost as in a great sea all the miserable wreckage of my wasted life—it seems to me, I say, as if my illness was that I remembered too much, too constantly, too vividly, for mental health. And now I remember still, yet not as of old with torture of shame and fury, but as if memories of her were all that life has left of sweetness.” He reined in his horse, and, gazing straight before him as at the rift of blue between the heavy clouds, went on still dreamily: “Strange, does it not seem to you? Strange even to myself! And I who could not trust her, when her every look and smile was for me, now I trust her, although, standing before us all, she would not defend her woman’s fame by one word.” They had reached the bridge that led across the moat to the yards. Here David, having hailed a stableman from a distance, dismounted and delivered over his horse. “Give me your arm, doctor,” said he, “I am stiff from the saddle and cold from my thoughts. I dread the going in; let us prolong our way sufficiently to put my dull blood in movement again. Yes, my kind old friend,” he went on, in answer to a shrewd look, “it is even so; I dread the moment of crossing my threshold where there is nought to greet us but whispers of the might-have-been.” “Man was never meant to live alone,” said Tutterville sententiously. “How often have I not told you so?” Leaning on the parson’s arm, David impelled him towards the narrow path that led to the fateful Herb-Garden. The wind had risen again; a rainstorm was impending. Overhead the branches were shaken as by an angry capricious hand; shreds of green foliage, and now and then an isolated prematurely yellow leaf, fluttered athwart them as they went. Sir David halted with a start as they came into the open space under the yew-tree. Where the ancient gateway had, with delicate curvet and strength of iron, guarded the forbidden close, was now a gap, ugly as a wound, beyond which the stretch of devastated garden lay raw to the gaze. Against the broken-down wall the useless unhinged doors lay propped.