“You understand, sir,” the gatekeeper asked him, “that, once you enter here, you may not go back whence you come for twenty-eight days, at least?”
“I understand,” said Holles, “and I come prepared to pay the price. So, in God’s name, open, friend.”
The gatekeeper shrugged. “Ye’re warned,” he said, and raised the bar, thus removing, as he thought, all obstacles that kept a fool from his folly.
Colonel Holles entered. The gates clashed behind him, and he took his way briskly, almost at a run, down the long avenue in the dappled shade of the beech trees and elms that bordered it, making straight for the nearest of the red-brick outhouses, which was the one which he himself had occupied during his sickness.
A broadly built, elderly woman perceived his approach from the doorway, and, after staring at him a moment in surprise and consternation, started forward to meet him, calling to him to stand. But he came on heedless and breathless until they were face to face.
“How came you in, you foolish man?” she cried.
“You don’t know me, Mrs. Barlow?” he asked her.
Startled anew by that pleasant, familiar address, she stared at him again. And then, under the finery and vigour investing him and rendering him almost unrecognizable to eyes that remembered only the haggard, meanly clad fellow of a month ago, she discovered him.
“Save us! It’s Colonel Holles!” And almost without pause she went on in a voice of distress: “But you were to have left the house of rest to-day. Whatever can have brought you back here to undo all again.”
“Nay, not to undo. To do, Mrs. Barlow, by God’s help. But ye’ve a singular good memory, to remember that I should be leaving to-day!”
She shook her head, and smiled with a touch of sadness. “’Twasn’t me that remembered, sir. It was Miss Sylvester.” And again she shook her head.
“Well enough, poor dear. But oh, so mortal sad. She’s yonder, resting, under the cedars--a place she’s haunted this past month.”
He swung aside, and, without more than a hurriedly flung word of thanks or excuse, he was gone swiftly across the lawn, towards that cluster of cedars, amid whose gnarled old trunks he could discern the flutter of a grey gown.
She had haunted the spot this month past, Mrs. Barlow had said. And it was the spot where they had spoken their farewells. Ah, surely Fortune would not trick him this time! Not again, surely, would she dash away the cup from his very lips, as so often she had done!