; but
this explanation was, after all, to my credit--I did not tell Maisie
because I knew that, taking all the circumstances into consideration, she
would fill herself with doubts and fears for me, and would for ever be
living in an atmosphere of dread lest I, like Phillips, should be found
with a knife-thrust in me. So much for that--it was in Maisie's own
interest. And why, after keeping silence to everybody, did I decide to
break it to Sir Gilbert Carstairs? There, Andrew Dunlop came in--of
course, unawares to himself. For in those lecturings that he was so fond
of giving us young folk, there was a moral precept of his kept cropping
up which he seemed to set great store by--"If you've anything against a
man, or reason to mistrust him," he would say, "don't keep it to
yourself, or hint it to other people behind his back, but go straight to
him and tell him to his face, and have it out with him." He was a wise
man, Andrew Dunlop, as all his acquaintance knew, and I felt that I could
do no better than take a lesson from him in this matter. So I would go
straight to Sir Gilbert Carstairs, and tell him what was in my mind--let
the consequences be what they might.

It was well after sunset, and the gloaming was over the hills and the
river, when I turned into the grounds of Hathercleugh and looked round me
at a place which, though I had lived close to it ever since I was born, I
had never set foot in before. The house stood on a plateau of ground high
above Tweed, with a deep shawl of wood behind it and a fringe of
plantations on either side; house and pleasure-grounds were enclosed by a
high ivied wall on all sides--you could see little of either until you
were within the gates. It looked, in that evening light, a romantic and
picturesque old spot and one in which you might well expect to see
ghosts, or fairies, or the like. The house itself was something between
an eighteenth-century mansion and an old Border fortress; its centre part
was very high in the roof, and had turrets, with outer stairs to them, at
the corners; the parapets were embattled, and in the turrets were
arrow-slits. But romantic as the place was, there was nothing gloomy
about it, and as I passed to the front, between the grey walls and a sunk
balustered garden that lay at the foot of a terrace, I heard through the
open windows of one brilliantly lighted room the click of billiard balls
and the sound of men's light-hearted laughter, and through another