The avenue and garden were quite deserted as Trix approached Chorley Old Hall. The lawn was one great sheet of unbroken whiteness, flanked by frosted yew hedges, and very desolate.

She passed quickly along the terrace towards the front door, feeling almost as if spying eyes were watching her from behind the curtained windows. She took hold of the hanging iron bell-handle and pulled it, its coldness striking through her glove with an icy chill. She heard its clang in some far-off region, yet oddly loud in the dead silence. Involuntarily she shivered, partly with the cold, and partly with a sudden sense of nervousness.

A second or two passed. Trix stared hard at the brass knocker on the door, trying to still the nervousness which possessed her. There came a sound of steps in the hall, and the door was opened.

“Can I see Mr. Danver?” asked Trix.

Jessop stared, visibly startled.

“It is all right,” said Trix quickly. “Don’t you remember I had tea here last August?”

Jessop’s face relaxed, but he looked a trifle dubious.

“I don’t think—” he began.

Trix raised her chin.

“Go and ask him,” she said with slight authority. “I will wait in the hall.”

Jessop departed, to return after a minute.

“Will you come this way, please, Madam.”

Nicholas Danver looked at her as she entered, an odd expression on his face.

He might never have moved from his chair since the day she had last seen him, thought Trix. The only difference in the surroundings was a crackling wood fire now burning on the big hearth.

“Well, Miss Devereux,” he said, holding out his hand.

“You don’t mind my having come?” queried Trix. “No one saw me.”

A slight look of relief passed over Nicholas’s face.

“I think I am glad you’ve come,” he said. “Sit down, please.”

Trix sat down. Her hands were tightly clasped within her muff. She was still beating back that quite unaccountable nervousness.

“You had a particular reason for coming to see me?” suggested Nicholas.

Trix nodded.

“Yes; I am in rather a difficulty. You are the only person who can help me.”

Nicholas laughed shortly.

“It is an odd experience to be told that I can be of service to any one,” he said. “What is it?”

Trix drew a long breath.

“Mr. Danver, I want you to release me from my promise.”

Nicholas’s eyes narrowed suddenly. A little gleam, like the spark from iron striking flint, flashed from them.

“What do you mean?” he asked coldly.

Trix’s heart chilled at the tone.

“I must try and explain,” she said. “In the first place, of course you know who your under-gardener really is?”

Nicholas stared at her.

“May I ask what that has got to do with you?”

“Well, I know too, you see,” said Trix, feeling her heart beginning to beat still more quickly.

“How do you know? What questions have you been asking?”

Trix flushed.

“I haven’t asked any questions,” she said quickly. “I saw him the day I came here before. I knew his face then, but I couldn’t remember who he was. Afterwards I remembered I used to play with him when I was a child.”

“Well?” queried Nicholas briefly.

“Well,” echoed Trix desperately, “I want to be able to tell someone he is Antony Gray, and not Michael Field. It is really very important that they should know, important for their happiness. But if I tell, they may want to know where I saw him, and ask questions which might lead to my either having to tell lies or betray your secret. If it becomes necessary, may I betray your secret? Will you release me from my promise?”

Nicholas’s hand clenched tightly on the arm of his chair.

“Most certainly not,” he replied shortly.

The tone was utterly final. Trix felt the old childish fear of him surging over her. It was quite different from the nervousness she had just been experiencing, and, oddly enough, it gave her a kind of desperate courage. She had no intention of accepting his refusal without a struggle.

“I wouldn’t tell unless it became absolutely necessary,” she urged.

“It never can be absolutely necessary,” he retorted. “It would be no more dishonourable to tell a lie than break a promise.”

Trix went scarlet.

“I never had the smallest intention of doing either,” she replied. “If I had, I need not have troubled to come up here and ask you to release me from my promise.”

Nicholas drummed his fingers on a small table near him.

“Well, you’ve had my answer,” he said.

His voice was perfectly adamantine. Trix felt as if she were up against a piece of rock. She knew it was useless to pursue the subject further, yet for Pia’s sake she tried again.

“Mr. Danver, why do you want everyone to think you’re dead?” There was something almost childish in the way she put the question.

Nicholas laughed.

“Partly, my dear young lady, for my own amusement, but largely for a scheme I have on hand.”

Trix leant forward.

“Is the scheme really important?” she queried, her eyes on his face.

“I don’t know,” he replied, watching her. “But my amusement is.”

“Amusement,” said Trix slowly.

“Yes, my amusement,” he repeated mockingly. “I’ve had none for fifteen years. For fifteen years I have lived here like a log, alone, solitary. Now I’ve got a little amusement in pretending to be dead.”

Trix shook her head. It sounded quite mad. Then she remembered Doctor Hilary’s words to her when she had met him at the gates of Chorley Old Hall last August. He knew it was mad, but it was saving Nicholas from being atrophied, so he had said. To Trix’s mind at least a dozen more satisfactory ways might have been found to accomplish that end. But every man to his own taste. Also it was quite possible that a brain which had been atrophied, or practically atrophied for fifteen years, was not particularly capable of conceiving anything more enlivening.

“But you needn’t have been a log for fifteen years,” she said suddenly.

“Needn’t I?” he retorted. “Look at me.” He made a gesture towards his helpless legs.

“I wasn’t thinking of your body,” said Trix calmly. “I was thinking of your mind.”

Nicholas’s face hardened.

“And so was I,” he replied, “when I preferred to sit here like a log, rather than face the prying sympathy of my fellow-humans.”

“Oh!” said Trix softly, a light of illumination breaking in upon her. “But, Mr. Danver, sympathy isn’t always prying.”

“Bah!” he retorted. “Prying or not, I didn’t want it. Staring eyes, condoling words, and mockery in their hearts! ‘He got what he deserved for his madness,’ they’d have said.”

Trix leant forward, putting her hands on the table.

“Mr. Danver,” she said thoughtfully, “if you were a younger man, or I were an older woman, I’d say you were—well, quite remarkably foolish.”

Nicholas chuckled. He liked this.

“You might forget our respective ages for a few moments,” he suggested, “that is, if you have anything enlivening to say.”

“I don’t know about it being enlivening,” remarked Trix calmly, “but I have got quite a good deal to say.”

“Say it then,” chuckled Nicholas.

Trix drew a deep breath.

“Mr. Danver, did you ever care for any one?”

Nicholas’s eyes blazed suddenly.

“What the devil—” he began. “I beg your pardon. I gave you leave to speak.”

Trix waved her hand.

“I was talking about men,” she said, “men pals. Were there any you ever cared about?”

Nicholas laughed shortly.

“Your father, my dear young lady, and Richard Gray, father of the man who has led to this interesting discussion.”

“They were really your friends?” queried Trix.

“The best fellows that ever stepped,” said Nicholas with unwonted enthusiasm.

Trix nodded. Her eyes were shining. She was thinking of her aunt’s disclosure regarding this Richard Gray.

“And I suppose,” she said coolly, “you rejoiced when Richard Gray lost his money? You laughed at him for a fool?”

Nicholas stared at her.

“What on earth do you mean?” he asked. “I never knew he had lost money. I would have given my right hand to help him if I had known.”

“He did lose money,” said Trix. “But that’s beside the point. You’d have helped him if you could? You wouldn’t have jeered at him?”

“What do you take me for?” asked Nicholas half angrily.

Trix looked very straight at him.

“Only what you take others for, Mr. Danver.”

There was a dead silence.

“Listen,” said Trix suddenly. “You would have been generous to him, because you cared for him. Do you really think you are the only generous friend?”

Nicholas looked at her. There was a gleam of laughter in his eyes.

“It strikes me you are a very shrewd young woman,” he said.

“It’s only logical common sense,” declared Trix stoutly.

Once more there fell a silence, a silence in which Nicholas was watching the girl opposite to him.

“Mr. Danver, will you tell me exactly what amusement you found in all this? What originated the idea in your mind?” Her voice was pleading.

For a moment Nicholas was silent.

“Yes,” he said suddenly, “I will tell you.”

It was not a long story, and to Trix it was oddly pathetic. It was the mixture partly of regret, partly the desire of justice to be administered to his property after his death, and partly the queer mad love of pranks which had been the keynote of his nature, and which had stirred again within the half-dead body. He told it all very simply, baldly almost, and yet he could not quite hide a certain queer wistfulness underlying it, the wistfulness of pride which has built barriers too strong for it, and yet from which it longs to escape.

“I thought Antony Gray could have a taste of living as one of the people,” he ended. “Perhaps it would make him a better master than I had been. And then the scheme took shape.”

“I see,” said Trix slowly and thoughtfully.

“Well?” queried Nicholas.

Trix looked up at him. Her lips were smiling, but there were tears in her eyes.

“I understand,” she said. “Perhaps I understand ever so much better than you think. But—but has it been worth it?”

Nicholas looked towards the fire.

“After the first planning, I don’t honestly know that it has,” he said. “A thing falls flat with no one to share it with you. And Hilary never really approved.”

Again there was a silence, and again the odd pathos, the childishness of the whole thing stirred Trix’s heart. She said she understood, and she did understand more profoundly than Nicholas could possibly have conceived. In the few seconds of silence which followed, she reviewed those solitary years in an amazingly quick mental process. She saw first the pride which had built the barrier, and then the slow stagnation behind it. She realized the two sentences which had penetrated the barrier (he had been perfectly candid in his story) without being able to destroy it, and then the faint stirrings of life within the almost stagnant mind. And the result had been this perfectly mad scheme,—the thought of a foolish boy conceived and carried out by the obstinate mind of a man; a scheme childish, foolish, mad, and of value only in so far as it had roused to faint life the mind of the lonely man who had conceived it.

And now he had tired of it. It had become to him as valueless as a flimsy toy; and yet he clung to it rather than leave himself with empty hands. Without it, he had absolutely nothing to interest him,—a past on which it hurt him to dwell by reason of its contrast with the present; a present as lonely almost as that of a prisoner in solitary confinement; and a future which to him was a mere blank, a grey nothingness.

Trix shivered involuntarily.

“And the fact remains, that I am dead,” said Nicholas with a grim smile.

Trix turned suddenly towards him.

“Unless you have a sort of resurrection,” she said.

Nicholas stared.

“Listen,” said Trix.