‘Took feather-head--ay, as a man in love with Folly might pluck and put a pasque-flower behind his ear. They’re long ridden off together.’ Brion heard in dismay. His superstitious tremors of the night had owed, then, to woefuller presage than any imagined hauntings. To lose his friend, thus, without warning, without a word! it was grievous. Something swelled in his breast. How could Clerivault have left him so? And yet he might have had no choice. Who was he to cross the will of that dark masterful spirit who controlled his destinies? It must have been his Uncle, the boy was now convinced, who had come into his room in the night, and looked down upon him. The thought thrilled him, half awfully, half glowingly. He pictured his own unconscious face, and that other, white and austere, bent above it--and the silent entry and the silent withdrawal. Why? Why had his Uncle arrived thus in the night, and as obscurely vanished, leaving no trace of his visit but that dreaming memory? And yet it was a memory he would not be without. He stood staring at the old woman. ‘I am in the dark,’ he said. Her eyes, like two round stones, were set fixedly on his. ‘Thou art not the first in this house to be,’ she said. ‘Secrets and mysteries before thy time have encompassed those that dwelt herein. Their shadows yet linger in the rooms and walk upon the stairs. Thou art not the first to feel the darkness and unrest. There is always coming and going here; ay, even when it is emptiest of mortal life--always something to see, though thou seest it not. This is the place where plots are laid in darkness and fulfilled in silence.’ To say that Brion, hearing her, was conscious of a passing chill is not to underrate his healthy young sanity. He believed the old creature crazy: yet there is an eeriness, after all, in crazy company. What she said might have no significance, but somehow it assorted drearily with the lonely and desolate house and with the strange movements of its inmates. His physical shiver converted itself, however, in shame of its own weakness, into a shrug of irritable dissent. ‘I am not afeard of your plots and shadows, old mother,’ said he, with petulant scorn. ‘It is enough shadow for me that my friend hath left me, without a word.’ She nodded her head grimly, thinning her lips. ‘Brave spirit,’ she said. ‘It shall need all of itself, maybe, in the days to come.’ He turned from her, with an impatient exclamation, and began to descend the stairs. Half way down he met the boy William, mounting hot-faced towards him. This was a buxom swain, on the near side of manhood, rosy and bucolic. His face was round as a gooseberry; an incipient corn-gold beard frizzled on the spit of his chin. He pulled up, and twitched his forelock with a breathless grimace. ‘Was comin’, Mars Brion, to help ee to dress,’ he said, panting. ‘Mars Phineas a bade me humbly to tender myself.’