That evening Endacott, in response to an urgent summons, rose somewhat reluctantly from his chair under the cedar tree, finished his coffee and offered a grudging explanation of his departure.

“Your aunt has sent in to say that she wishes to see me particularly,” he confided to Claire. “Just the hour of the day when I like to rest!”

“What a pity!” she murmured. “Shall I come with you?”

He shook his head.

“No need for two of us to go on a fool’s errand,” he grumbled.

He crossed the lawn, passed down a gravel path, and, opening the postern gate, made his way into the lane which divided the Great House and the Little House. A moment or two later he was ushered into Madame’s drawing-room.

“You did not mind coming, Ralph?” she asked a little anxiously.

“As a rule,” he admitted, selecting a chair close to her couch, “I prefer my evenings undisturbed. Since you expressed a wish to see me, however, I am here.”

His tone seemed scarcely propitious. She looked at him wistfully. The years, she decided, had treated him hardly. There was little of sympathy in his face, little left of gentleness. Almost from the first she felt that her task was hopeless.

“Sir Bertram came down to see me this afternoon,” she began.

He nodded without speech, and waited.

“He comes down every other day when he is at Ballaston,” she went on. “No one in the world, Ralph, has ever been so kind to me.”

“That,” he rejoined, “may be a matter of opinion.”

“But Ralph,” she pleaded, “it isn’t a matter of opinion at all. It is a fact. I ought to know, oughtn’t I? Look at me. What am I but a poor invalid woman, the victim of a terrible accident. My limbs have been almost useless for years. Even now I can scarcely move. I am a depressing sight for any one. What but real affection and kindness could bring him here day after day?”

“Did kindness,” he asked bluntly, “prompt him to take you away from your husband?”

“Bertram never took me away from Maurice,” she expostulated. “Maurice left me—left me for some Algerian dancing girl, for whom he bought a villa at Cannes and on whom he squandered half his fortune. All the world knows that. Bertram brought me back from Paris a crushed, humiliated woman. It wasn’t his fault that he was in the motor when the accident happened.”

“There have been different versions of the affair,” Endacott declared moodily.

Madame’s eyes suddenly flashed.

“If you dare tell me that I may not love Bertram—that I do not love him—that there is any sin in my loving him, then you are a fool!” she cried. “Of course I love him. No one in the world could ever have been so wonderful to a woman as he has been to me.”

“His reputation,” Endacott began——

“Ralph!” she interrupted indignantly. “You are too great a man to talk such shibboleth. I dare say he has been a rouÉ, and a profligate and a great gambler. I dare say he has squandered his money, has been reckless and selfish, but don’t you understand, Ralph, he is of the sort of men who could never treat a woman badly? I wish I could make you understand. At least, believe me that Bertram has treated me from the moment we first met—even when I was desperate, willing in my heart to consent to anything—as though I were a thing almost sacred. He kept my self-respect alive. I’m a broken creature now, but all there is in my life worth having I owe to him.”

Endacott moved a little uneasily in his chair.

“Well,” he said, “we will not dig into the past. It is scarcely profitable, anyhow. Your message said that you wished to see me particularly this evening.”

“Ralph,” she begged, “we have drifted a long way apart, but we were children together. Can’t we talk in a little more friendly fashion? Can’t you look as though you remembered that we are still brother and sister?”

He took her hand a little awkwardly.

“My dear AngÈle,” he pointed out, “the very fact that I chose to come here is proof that I remember it. I returned to England partly for Claire’s sake, and partly because I wished to be near you. I admit that I did not know that you were living in the shadow and the lustre of the Ballaston rÉgime, but that is nothing—prejudice, without a doubt. I came. If I could make your life easier, I would be glad. Is it money? I have plenty.”

She shook her head.

“I want to save the Ballastons,” she confided.

“Are they in any particular danger?” he asked coldly.

“You can’t have lived here even this short time without knowing it,” she answered. “Bertram’s father was a great gambler, and Bertram himself has gambled. Quite true. He has raced and made a failure of it. That also is true. He has kept expensive establishments everywhere, spent money like water, lived altogether beyond his means. All quite true. Other men have done this, Ralph, who are not worthless, and Bertram Ballaston is not worthless. Every acre of the estate is mortgaged now. Unless they can raise money within the next few months there is nothing left for them but to break the entail, pay their debts and disappear.”

Endacott was unmoved, his indifference apparent.

“Would the world be any the worse?” he ventured.

“We will leave the world out,” she entreated. “It would break my heart.”

“What can I do about it?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.

“Perhaps nothing,” she admitted. “I do not ask you to attempt impossibilities.”

“What do you ask?” he persisted doggedly.

“Bertram believes,” she went on, “that in that Image which Gregory went out to China to try to secure is hidden a treasure.”

“Secure,” he sneered, “is a quaint word.”

“I won’t argue with you about that, Ralph,” she said. “The fact remains that it was a dangerous adventure for a young man and it was undertaken for a worthy object. He risked his life, didn’t he, a dozen times over? Perhaps he failed. You know best.”

“What do I know?” he demanded.

“Whether he really has a chance of finding the treasure—whether the story is true.”

Endacott was silent for several moments, no longer indifferent, gazing into the lamplit recesses of the room, the muscles around his eyes more than once twitching.

“Supposing that it is true,” he suddenly burst out, his long frame distended, his thin lips parted so that his yellow teeth almost protruded, his eyes steely—“supposing it is true that he has, say, a portion of them in his grasp—the treasures which the priests of Yun-Tse have collected through all the centuries—what are they but the emblems of self-sacrifice, the gifts of men aiming towards spirituality, denying themselves to give to some shadowy god? Think of it, AngÈle—century after century, denying themselves, those poor creatures who lived with their heads bent to the land, feeding like cattle, living and dying like sheep, denying themselves for the sake of that strange vein of spirituality that runs through all so-called heathen races. Is all their self-denial, all they went through, the result of it all, to go to reinstate in luxury and prosperity a family of foreign rouÉs and gamblers?”

“Why go into the history of the treasure?” she demanded. “What about all the treasures of Peru and Mexico, brought into the old world? Where did they come from? Who asks? Who cares? What about the adventurers all the world over, who wrenched from the new countries they risked their lives to discover, gold and gems and metals and brought them to the melting-pot of life? You were not always a sentimentalist, Ralph,” she went on, after a moment’s half-choked pause. “You know perfectly well that if the gems are there, whatever their history may be, they are no good to any one hidden and unseen. If, on the other hand, they belong to any one to-day, any one family, any one power, they belong to the family who learned of their existence and whose son went out and risked his life to acquire them.”

“You are very eloquent, AngÈle,” he observed in a noncommittal manner.

“Every one who believes what they say is eloquent,” she rejoined.

He rose to his feet and walked to the further end of the room abruptly and without excuse. For several moments he looked out of the window, first across to the red brick wall bordering his domain, and then down the narrow lane at the end of which half a dozen villagers were gathered together, sluggishly gossiping. Above the roofs of the village was the sloping park, but the moon had not yet risen and here was only a sea of obscurity. On his way back he poured himself out a glass of water and drank it.

“AngÈle,” he said, “our lives have lain very far apart. I have seen very little of you, understood very little of you. Did you love De Fourgenet?”

“I have loved only one man,” she replied, “and I have loved him, not, as you believe, for his unworthiness, but for his worthiness. De Fourgenet turned my head for a week—and neglected me for years. I loved Bertram from the first day we met. He knew it and never once took advantage of the knowledge.”

“I would to God I felt convinced,” he exclaimed, almost passionately, “whether you tell the truth or lie to shield the man you love.”

“I tell the truth,” she assured him with fervour. “Anything there might have been between Bertram and myself would have been at my seeking, not his. He is of the race of evil-doers, if you must call him an evil-doer—God knows they exist—to whom women are sacred.”

Endacott thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and sank almost sulkily lower into his chair. It was as though he were being convinced against his will.

“Well,” he confided, “here is the truth—as much of it as I know. The Ballastons have one of the two Images. I have the other. Nothing from a structural and material point of view suggests the presence of treasure in their interior, and yet I believe that the jewels are there. For years there has been deposited with us a coffer of manuscripts which came first from the Summer Palace of the Emperor and afterwards from the Temple of Yun-Tse. One of those manuscripts which I am now deciphering professes to give precise instructions as to how to secure the jewels. There are only a few passages which I cannot master. I am going to London in a day or two to obtain from the British Museum a dictionary of Mongolian dialects, which is the only thing I need to help me to complete certain phrases. You might think that I could guess at them. I cannot, because even the manuscript is in code. I need the actual letters. I believe that the jewels are in one or both of the Images. Within a week I shall know how to extract them.”

She laid her fingers upon his arm.

“Ralph dear,” she begged, “when that time comes—you are wealthy——”

He stopped her. For a moment the expression of almost superb scorn in his face lent him an unusual and unaccustomed dignity.

“AngÈle,” he interrupted, “you do not understand. If I were a pauper, I would refuse to supply the material needs of life with the accumulated offerings of these peasant worshippers. But as it happens, money is no temptation to me. I am already rich. In fairness the treasure such as it is should go back to China. If I were a younger, stronger man, the crowning joy of my life would be to take it back and to choose for myself how to distribute it. That, however, can never be. I will try to be fair from your point of view. China has a claim to the treasure. That young man, Gregory Ballaston, may be said to also have a claim—a claim which I should never have admitted for a single moment but for your prayers. Leave it to me. I will decide.”

There was between them a long and rather wonderful silence. The church clock behind the cottages in the background chimed twice before either of them spoke. Madame was lying flat on her back, her eyes watching the moon rising slowly over the top of the red brick wall. Endacott, as though overcome with a curious fit of exhaustion, was seated almost huddled up in his chair. Finally he rose wearily to his feet.

“I am tired to-night, AngÈle,” he confessed. “We understand one another?”

“We understand and I pray,” she answered, grasping his hand.

He left the house then and, instead of immediately entering the postern gate opposite, turned his face towards the village. There were a few lights burning in the windows of the irregular row of houses, scarcely a person in the street. He walked to the corner of the lane and looked down the main thoroughfare. At its further end was a trough and a market cross, on the stone balustrade of which some boys and girls were seated, plunged in eloquent silence. From behind one of the drawn blinds came the sound of a gramophone, and through the open door of the Ballaston Arms the wheezing of a concertina. Up in the background some scattered lights flashed out from the far-spread windows of the Hall, the outline of which was not yet visible. Endacott retraced his steps slowly. In his ears was a faint tinkling of other music, grotesque, monotonous, yet thrilling; before his eyes a strange admixture of roofs; beneath his nostrils an odour which never sprung from the soils of Norfolk; in his brain a confused tumult of thoughts.

Claire, a little bored, a slim, white figure in the violet darkness, leaned forward and waved her hand as he entered the postern gate.

“Nunks, what ages you have been!” she exclaimed. “Have you been with Aunt AngÈle all this time?”

“Not all the time,” he admitted.

“Where have you been then?” she persisted. “You look half asleep.”

He sank back into his chair. Again he seemed to hear the echo of some tinkling instrument, to find in his nostrils a perfume more pungent even than the perfume of the cedar tree. To him there was something ominous in what seemed to be almost a message of recall.

“A long journey,” he muttered, a little vaguely.