The autumn was now nearly over, and it was that bleak, chill season just before winter when the trees, denuded of foliage, seemed to wait for the snow to cover the bare branches which shivered complainingly in the chill wind. Under foot the ground was dark and sodden, overhead the sky dull and lowering, while piercingly cold blasts blew across the lonely marshes and whistled shrilly over the waste moorland. Dreary and desolate as it had looked in summer time, Garsworth Grange appeared even more dreary and desolate under the sombre-coloured sky. The damp had discoloured the white marble of the statues, which seemed lost amid the surrounding desert of bare trees and dead leaves. It was everlastingly raining, and Una, looking out of the antique windows at the gloomy landscape seen through the driving mists of rain, felt dull and depressed. All day long the winds whistled through the dismal rooms, and the rain ceaselessly dripped from the eaves, so it was hardly to be wondered that both Una and Miss Cassy felt anything but cheerful. It was now about two months since Reginald had gone up to town, and Una had received frequent letters from him about the way in which everything was being arranged by the lawyers. Of late these letters had become feverish in tone, as if the writer were trying to invest his correspondence with a kind of fictitious gaiety he was far from feeling, and this sudden change of style gave her serious uneasiness. She knew how sensitive Reginald was, and how deeply he had felt the discovery of his real birth, so dreaded lest to banish the spectres which haunted him he should plunge into dissipation. In one of his letters also he had mentioned that he had met Beaumont in town, and as Una learned from the vicar that Dick Pemberton had gone to Folkestone to see his uncle, she felt doubtful as to the wisdom of an inexperienced youth like Reginald being left alone in London with a reckless, man of the world like Beaumont. She had mistrusted Beaumont when she first met him, but by his fascinating manner he had succeeded in overcoming her repugnance, but now that he was away the influence of his strong personality died out, and she began to dread his power over her lover's honourable, guileless nature. "I wish Reginald would come back at once," she said to Miss Cassy, "and then we could be married, and he would have some one to look after him." "I'm sure I'll be glad when you are married," whimpered Miss Cassy, whose spirits the lonely life she was leading sadly depressed. "I'll go melancholy mad if I stay here--I know I shall. I'm sure that isn't odd, is it? I feel like what's-her-name in the Moated Grange, you know--the weary, weary dead thing I mean, and the gloomy flats--not half so nice as the flat we had in town. If we could only go to it again--I feel so shivery."