The two friends proceeded towards Bindon House in silence. The reverend Horatio was now pondering over certain phrases of David’s which seemed ever and again, like the lightning that on a dark night flashes out upon the bewildered wayfarer, one instant to show him the road, only to leave him the next hopelessly groping in the mire. “If she had grown into your heart, how had it been with mine!... Why, man, I have loved her since the first instant! First I was wrapt in gorgeous dreams, and then there came the blank. Then came the blank—then came the _blank_.” The phrase recurred, with meaning insistence like the burden of a catch. Presently he gave a kind of start. If he dared but connect these flashes! If he but dared hazard his unsteady steps upon the astonishing road they seemed to reveal! But he kept his peace. In spirit David was back in the Herb-Garden, not the poor, dishonoured, bruised place upon which he had just turned his back, but the garden of that wondrous dawn where he and Ellinor had wandered into such a lovely land. He yearned for the moment when the guardian gates should be erect once more and the key of them within his hand.—Therein, as a man locks up the casket that holds the faded flowers, the crushed letters, all that fate has left him of his love, would he hold close for evermore the tenderest memory of his life. CHAPTER II A MESSENGER OF GLAD TIDINGS Oh, my love, my breath of life, where art thou! —KEATS (_Endymion_). Sir David turned into the library and flung himself into a chair with a sigh that was almost a groan. And Dr. Tutterville could have echoed it as he looked round:—the ghosts that Ellinor had chased had all returned with the dust on the window-pane, with the dead flowers in the bowl, with the stagnant atmosphere of a fireless unaired room. The very books seemed to have lost their souls, to have become but matter, telling of nought but the futility of all things. Dimness and desolation brooded again over the house. The parson tried to pump up some consoling phrase, stopped midway, coughed, went to the window and began to tap aimlessly on the pane. A selfish, elderly longing seemed to draw him back towards his own cosy fireside, where no haunting regret had ever quite extinguished the light of sunny Greek or philosophic Latin; where melancholy assumed no sterner guise than the placid analytic countenance of old Burton. He glanced again at the long figure in the chair, now bent in utter weariness, and the inner voice asked anxiously in a whisper: “How long will the new-found sanity last in such conditions as these?” Into this brooding came a sudden clamour from without. It was the voice of Madam Tutterville calling upon her spouse with every note of impatience and exultation; and a moment later the lady herself appeared in the doorway, panting but radiant.