which his extended finger pointed, and
her eyes took in, not only Apsley, but his life and the true gulf
that lay between them. As she saw it from there, she recognized it
as a place which, passing, even in those better days when her father
had lived in the quaint little rectory at Cailsham, she might have
exclaimed--"Oh, what a lovely place that is! I wonder who lives
there?" And it had belonged to him--this man who had taken her life
out of its dreary groove and placed it in a pleasure-garden of plenty;
but the garden gate was not locked and the key was not in her keeping.

This mood was momentary. It passed, scudding across her mind, a
fringe of rain cloud that the wind has caught hanging between the
hill-tops and driven at its will. When Traill leant out of the car
and gave peremptory orders of direction, she forgot about it. Then,
in his almost boyish excitement, she realized how much the place
really was to him; how much, notwithstanding all his Bohemianism,
it counted in his life.

"You love this place--don't you?" she said, when he dropped back
again into his seat.

"Yes--I should think so. I know every stick and stone for miles round
here. See that little lane up there?"

"Yes."

"Had a fight there once with a gamekeeper. Much more exciting, I can
tell you, than that show you saw that night."

"Were you hurt?" she asked, frowning.

"Oh, not much; not more than he was. It was stopped precipitously
by a stick, wielded by my governor. He'd got wind of it. We hadn't
much time to make a mess of each other."

"I suppose it must be full of memories," she said. "I can never
understand why you should have given it up."

"Oh, I was a fool, of course. I wanted ready money, and I didn't want
to sell the place--couldn't have sold it. So I let my sister take
it over for what the pater had left her. That suited me at the time.
I'm not sorry that I saw far enough to re-purchase if I wanted to."

"You can re-purchase?"

"Lord, yes!"

"But you did not tell me that."

"Didn't I? Oh yes, I can re-purchase; five thousand any day will make
this place my own again. That's the sum I took from my sister."

Sally inclined her head to show that she understood, but she made
no reply. The cloud had blown back again into her mind. She felt the
shadow of it, the chill of it, even in the warm sunshine. It took
no definite shape, it brought no definite warning; but she was
oppressively conscious of its presence and its weig