olly or not at all. Your people are not my
people, their ways are not my ways. We should not get along. And if you
lived with me over there you might as well stay here, for your
influence over them would be quite as removed. Moreover, if they are of
the right stuff, the memory of you will be quite as potent for good as
your actual presence."

"Not unless I died."

Again something within him trembled. "Do you believe you are going to
die young?" he blurted out.

But she would not answer.

He entered the nursery abruptly the next day and found her packing her
dolls. When she saw him, she sat down and began to weep hopelessly. He
knew then that his fate was sealed. And when, a year later, he received
her last little scrawl, he was almost glad that she went when she did.

II

The Striding Place

Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse-shooting. To
stand propped against a sod fence while his host's workmen routed up the
birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him
feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and
forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth
the killing. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever
proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his
estates in the South. The amusements of life, he argued, should be
accepted with the same philosophy as its ills.

It had been a bad day. A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it
fairly sprang beneath the feet. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of
their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been
small. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of
a new-minded _debutante_ who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the
verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above
them.

But it was no one of these things that sat on Weigall's mind as, when
the other men went up to bed, he let himself out of the castle and
sauntered down to the river. His intimate friend, the companion of his
boyhood, the chum of his college days, his fellow-traveller in many
lands, the man for whom he possessed stronger affection than for all
men, had mysteriously disappeared two days ago, and his track might have
sprung to the upper air for all trace he had left behind him. He had
been a guest on the adjoining estate during the past week, shooting with
the fervor of the true sportsman,