He had a great mind to repack his portmanteau and sling it over his shoulder, and tramp through the night to the nearest station. But to what good? For wherever he might go the same risk would meet him. How tranquil the night was as he looked out of the window, a great moon shining over the openings of the park, making the silence and the vacant spaces so doubly solitary! He dared not break the sanctity of that solitude by going out into it, any more than he dared disturb the quiet of the fully populated and deeply sleeping house. He had no right, for any caprice or personal cowardice of his, to disturb that stillness. And then it gave him a curious contradictory sensation, half of relief from his own thoughts, half of sympathy, to think that there were already here the elements of a far greater disturbance than any he could work, beginning to move within the house itself, working, perhaps, toward a catastrophe of its own. In the midst of all he suddenly stopped and laughed to himself, and went to bed at last with the most curiously subdued and softened sensation. He had remembered the look of the child whom he had lifted from the ground at the little gate of Greenbank--how she had suddenly been stilled in her childish mischief, and fixed him with her big, innocent, startled eyes. Poor little thing! She was innocent enough, whatever might be the nest from which she came. This was the thought with which he closed his eyes. CHAPTER VI. Mr. Wradisley had never been known to give so much attention to any of his mother’s entertainments before. Those which were more exclusively his own, the periodical dinners, the parties of guests occasionally assembled in the house either for political motives or in discharge of what he felt to be his duty as an important personage in the county, or for shooting--which was the least responsible of all, but still the man’s part in a house of the highest class--he did give a certain solemn and serious attention to. But it had never been known that he had come out of himself, or even out of his library, which was in a manner the outer shell and husk of himself, for anything in the shape of an occasional entertainment, the lighter occurrences of hospitality. On this occasion, however, he was about all the morning with a slightly anxious look about his eyes, in the first place to see that the day promised well, to examine the horizon all round, and discuss the clouds with the head gardener, who was a man of much learning and an expert, as might be said, on the great question of the weather. That great authority gave it as his opinion that it would keep fine all day. “There may be showers in the evening, I should not wonder, but the weather will keep up for to-day,” he said, backing his opinion with many minutiæ about the shape of the clouds and the indications of the wind. Mr. Wradisley repeated this at the breakfast table with much seriousness.