It was quite dark now, and the one or two rare passers-by that he met on the way passed him like ghosts, yet turned their heads toward him suspiciously, wondering who he was. They were villagers unwillingly out in the night upon business of their own; they divined a gentleman, though it was too dark to see him, and wondered who the soft-footed, slim figure could be, no one imagining for a moment who it really was. And yet he had already made two or three pilgrimages like this to visit the lady who for the first time in his life had made the sublime Mr. Wradisley a suitor. He felt, as he opened softly his own gate, that it was a thing that must not be repeated; but yet that it was in its way natural and seemly that his suit should not be precisely like that of an ordinary man. Henceforward it could be conducted in a different way, now that she was aware of his feelings without the cognizance of any other person. If it could be possible that her prejudices or caprice should hold out, nobody need be the wiser. But he did not believe that this would be the case. She had been startled, let it even be said shocked, to have discovered that she was loved, and by such a man as himself. There was even humility--the sweetest womanly quality--in her conviction that it was impossible, impossible that she, with no first love to give him, should be sought by him. But this would not stand the reflection of a propitious night, of a new day. CHAPTER V. The dinner was quite a cheerful meal at Wradisbury that night. The master of the house was exactly as he always was. Punctilious in every kindness and politeness, perfect in his behavior. To see him take his mother in as he always did, as if she were the queen, and place her in her own chair, where she had presided at the head of that table for over forty years, was in itself a sight. He was the king regnant escorting a queen dowager--a queen mother, not exactly there by personal right, but by conscious delegation, yet supreme naturalness and reverence, from him. He liked to put her in her place. Except on occasions when there were guests he had always done it since the day of his father’s death, with a sort of ceremony as showing how he gave her all honor though this supreme position was no longer her absolute due. He led her in with special tenderness to-night. It perhaps might not last long, this reign of hers. Another and a brighter figure was already chosen for that place, but as long as the mother was in it, the honor shown to her should be special, above even ordinary respect. I think Ralph was a little fretted by this show of reverence. Perhaps, with that subtle understanding of each other which people have in a family, even when they reach the extreme of personal difference or almost alienation, he knew what was in his brother’s mind, and resented the consciousness of conferring honor which moved Reginald. In Ralph’s house (or so he thought) the mother would rule without any show of derived power.