Meanwhile the young people had passed through the great gate and turned to the right. "Do you mind which way you go?" Barbara asked, and Reynold replied that he left it entirely to her. "Then," she said, "we will go this way, and come back by the village; you will get a better view so."

At first, however, it seemed that a view was the one thing which was certainly not to be had in the road they had chosen. On their left was a tangled hedge, on their right a dank and dripping plantation of firs. The slim, straight stems, seen one beyond another, conveyed to Reynold the impression of a melancholy crowd, pressing silently to the boundary of the road on which he walked. It was one of those fantastic pictures which reveal themselves in unfamiliar landscapes, and Barbara, who had seen the wood under a score of varying aspects, took no especial heed of this one, as she picked her way daintily by the young man's side. Indeed she did not even note the moment when the trees were succeeded by a turnip-field, lying wide and wet under the pale sky. But when in its turn the field gave place to an open gateway and a drive full of deep ruts, in which the water stood, she paused. "You see that house?" she said.

It was evident from its surroundings of soaked yard, miscellaneous buildings, dirty tumbrils, and clustered stacks, that it was a farmhouse. Harding looked at it and turned inquiringly to her. "It was much larger once," said Barbara. "Part of it was pulled down a long while ago. Your people lived here before they built Mitchelhurst Place."

He pushed out his lower lip. "Well," he said, "I think they showed their good taste in getting out of this."

"But it was better then," said the girl. "And even now, sometimes in the spring when I come here for cowslips——"

She stopped short, for he was smiling. "Oh, no doubt! Everything looks better then. But I have come too late." He had to step aside as he spoke to let a manure cart go by, labouring along the miry way. "And what do you call this house?" he asked.

"Mitchelhurst Hall. I don't think there is anything much to see, but if you would like to look over it or to walk round it——"

"No, thank you; I am content." He took off his hat in mocking homage to the home of the Rothwells, and turned to go. "And have you any more decayed residences to show me, Miss Strange?"

"Only some graves," she answered, simply.

"Oh, they are all graves!" said Harding with his short laugh, swinging his umbrella as they resumed their walk. Already Barbara had become accustomed to that little jarring laugh, which had no merriment in it. She did not like it, but she was curiously impressed by it. When the young man was grave and stiff and shy she was sorry for him; she remembered that he was only Mr. Reynold Harding, their guest for a week. But when he was sufficiently at his ease to laugh she felt as if all the Rothwells were mocking, and she were the interloper and inferior.

"I suppose it does seem like that to you—as if they were all graves," she said timidly, as she led the way across the road to a gate in the tangled hedge; the field into which it led sloped steeply down. "That is what people call the best view of Mitchelhurst," she explained.

To the left was Mitchelhurst Place, gaunt and white among its warped and weather-beaten trees. Before them lay the dotted line of Mitchelhurst Street, and they looked down into the square cabbage-plots. The sails of the windmill swung heavily round, and the smoke went up from the blacksmith's forge. To the right was the church, with its thickset tower, and the sun shining feebly on the wet surface of its leaden roof. Barbara pointed out a small oblong patch of grass and evergreens as the vicarage garden, while a bare building, of the rawest red brick, was the Mitchelhurst workhouse. The view was remarkably comprehensive. Mitchelhurst lay spread below them in small and melancholy completeness.

"Yes, it's all there, right enough," said Reynold, leaning on the gate. "An excellent view. All there, from the Place where my people spent their money, to the workhouse, where——By Jove!" his voice dropped suddenly, "I'm not Rothwell enough to have a right to be taken into the Mitchelhurst workhouse! They'd send me on somewhere, I suppose. I wonder which they would call my parish!"

"Are you sorry?" Barbara asked, after a pause.

"Sorry not to be in the workhouse?" indicating it with a slight movement of his finger. "No, not particularly."

"I didn't mean that," said the girl, a little shortly. "I meant, of course, are you sorry you are not a Rothwell?"

"I don't know."

He spoke slowly, half reluctantly, and still leaned on the gate, with his eyes wandering from point to point of the little landscape, which was softened and saddened by the pale light and paler haze of October. It was Barbara who finally broke the silence. "You didn't like the house this morning, and you didn't like the old hall just now, so I thought most likely you wouldn't care for this."

"Well, it isn't beautiful," he replied, without turning his head. "Do you care much about it, Miss Strange? Why should anybody care about it? There are wonderful places in the world—beautiful places full of sunshine. Why should we trouble ourselves about this little grey and green island where we happened to be born? And what are these few acres in it more than any other bit of ploughed land and meadow?"

"I thought you didn't care for it," said Barbara, sagely. "I thought you scorned it."

"Scorn it—I can't scorn it! It isn't mine!" He turned away from it, as if in a sudden movement of impatience, and lounged with his back to the gate. "It's like my luck!" he said, kicking a stone in the road.

Barbara was interested. Harding's tone revealed the strength and bitterness of his feelings. He had never seemed to her so much of a Rothwell as he did at that moment. "What is like your luck?" she ventured to ask.

He jerked his head in the direction of Mitchelhurst. "I may as well be honest," he said. "Honest with myself—if I can! Look there—I have mocked at that place all my life; for very shame's sake I have kept away from it because I had vowed I didn't care whether one stone of it was left upon another. What was it to me? I am not a Rothwell. I'm Reynold Harding, son of Sidney Harding, son of Reynold Harding—there my pedigree grows vague. My grandfather is an important man—we can't get beyond him. He died while my father was in petticoats. He was a pork-butcher in a small way. I believe he could write his name—my name—and that he always declared that his father was a Reynold too. But we don't know anything about my great-grandfather—perhaps he was a pork-butcher in a smaller way. My uncle Robert went to London as a boy and made all the money, pensioned his father, and afterwards educated his half-brother Sidney, who was twenty years younger than himself. He would have made my father his partner if he had lived. If my father had lived I might have been rich. As it is, I'm not rich, and I'm not a Rothwell."

"Well, you look like one!" said Barbara. She was not very wise. It seemed to her a cruel thing that this earlier Reynold should have been a pork-butcher—a misfortune on which she would not comment. She looked up at the younger Reynold with the sincerest sympathy shining in her eyes, and in an unreasoning fashion of her own took part with him and with the old family, as if his grandfather were an unwarranted intruder who had thrust himself into their superior society. "You look like one!" she exclaimed, and Reynold smiled.

"And after all," she said, pursuing her train of thought, "you are half Rothwell, you know. As much Rothwell as Harding, are you not?"

He was still smiling. "True. But that is a kind of thing which doesn't do by halves."

She assented with a sigh. She had never before talked to a man whose grandfather was a pork-butcher, and she did not know what consolation to offer. She could only look shyly and wistfully at Mr. Harding, as he leaned against the gate with his back to the prospect, while she resolved that she would never tell her uncle. She did not think her companion less interesting after the revelation. This discord, this irony of fate, this mixing of the blood of the Rothwells and the small tradesman, seemed to her to explain much of young Harding's sullen discontent. He was the last descendant of the old family of which she had dreamed so often, and he was the victim of an unmerited wrong. She wanted him to say more. "And you wouldn't come to Mitchelhurst before?" she said, suggestively.

"No; but the thought of the place was pulling at me all the time. I couldn't get rid of it. And so—here I am! And I have seen the dream of my life face to face—it's behind my back just at this minute, but I can see it as well as if I were looking at it. I'm very grateful to you for showing me this view, Miss Strange, but you'll excuse me if I don't turn round while I speak of it?"

"Oh, yes," said Barbara, wonderingly.

He had his elbows on the top rail of the gate, and looked downward at the muddy way, rough with the hoof marks of cattle. "You see," he explained, "I want to say the kind of thing one says behind a—a landscape's back."

"I'm sorry to hear it," she answered. She had drawn a little to one side, and had laid a small gloved hand on one of the gate posts. Somebody, many years before, had deeply cut a clumsy M on the cracked and roughened surface of the wood. The letter was as grey and as weather-worn as the rest. Barbara touched it delicately with a finger-tip, and followed its ungainly outline. Probably it was his own initial that the rustic had hacked, standing where he stood, but she recognised the possibility that the rough carving might be the utterance of the great secret of joy and pain, and the touch was almost a caress.

"Some people follow their dreams through life, and never get more than a glimpse of them, even as dreams," said Harding, slowly. "Well, I have seen mine. I have had a good look at it. I know what it is like. It is dreary—it is narrow—cold—hideous."

"Oh!" cried Barbara, as if his words hurt her. Then, recovering herself, "I'm sorry you dislike it so much. Well, you must give it up, mustn't you?"

He laughed. "Life without a fancy, without a desire?" he said.

"Find something else to wish for."

"What? If there were anything else, should I care twopence for Mitchelhurst? No, it is my dream still—a dream I'm never likely to realise, but the only possible dream for me. Only now I know how poor and dull my highest success would be."

"You had better have stayed away," said the girl.

He took his elbows off the gate, and bowed in acknowledgment of the polite speech. "Oh, you know what I mean," she said hurriedly.

"Yes, I know. And, except for the kindness of your fairy godmother, I believe you are perfectly right. That, of course, is a different question."

Barbara would not answer what she fancied might be a sneer. "You see the place at its worst," she said, "and there is nobody to care for it; everything is neglected and going to ruin. Don't you think it would be different if it belonged to some one who loved it? Why don't you make your fortune," she exclaimed, with sanguine, bright-eyed directness, as if the fortune were an easy certainty, "and come back and set everything right? Don't you think you could care for Mitchelhurst if——"

She would have finished her sentence readily enough, but Reynold caught it up.

"If!" he said, with a sudden startled significance in his tone. Then, with an air of prompt deference, "Shall I go and make the fortune at once, Miss Strange? Shall I? Yes, I think I could care for Mitchelhurst, as you say, if—" He smiled. "One might do much with a fortune, no doubt."

"Make it then," said Barbara, conscious of a faint and undefined embarrassment.

"Must it be a very big one?"

"Oh, I think it may as well be a tolerable size, while you are about it. Hadn't we better be moving on?"

Mr. Harding assented. "Where are we going now?"

"To the church. That is, if you care to go there."

"Oh, I like to go very much. I wonder what you would call a tolerable fortune," he said in a meditative tone.

"My opinion doesn't matter."

"But you are going to wish me success while I am away making it?"

"Oh, certainly."

"That will be a help," he said gravely. "I shan't look for an omen in the sky just now—do you see how threatening it is out yonder?"

The clouds rolled heavily upwards, and massed themselves above their heads as they hastened down a steep lane which brought them out by the church. Barbara stopped at the clerk's cottage for a ponderous key, and then led the way through a little creaking gate. The path along which they went was like a narrow ditch, the mould, heaped high on either side, seemed as if it were burdened with his imprisoned secrets. The undulating graves, overgrown with coarse grasses, rose up, wave-like, against the buttressed walls of the churchyard, high above the level of the outer road. The church itself looked as if it had been dug out of the sepulchral earth, so closely was it surrounded by these shapeless mounds. Barbara, to whom the scene was nothing new, and who was eager to escape the impending shower, flitted, alive, warm, and young, through all this cold decay, and never heeded it. Harding followed her, looking right and left. They passed under two dusky yew trees, and then she thrust her big key into the lock of the south door.

"Are my people buried in the churchyard?" he asked.

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed reverentially. "Your people are all inside."

He stepped in, but when he was about to close the door he stood for a moment, gazing out through the low-browed arch. It framed a picture of old-fashioned headstones fallen all aslant, nettles flourishing upon forgotten graves, the trunks of the great yews, the weed-grown crest of the churchyard wall, defined with singular clearness upon a wide band of yellow sky. The gathered tempest hung above, and its deepening menace intensified the pale tranquillity of the horizon. "I say," said Harding as he turned away, "it's going to pour, you know!"

"Well, we are under shelter," Barbara answered cheerfully, as she laid her key on the edge of one of the pews. "If it clears up again so that we get back in good time it won't matter a bit. And anyhow we've got umbrellas. The font is very old, they say."

Harding obediently inspected the font.

"And there are two curious inscriptions on tablets on the north wall. Mr. Pryor—he's the vicar—is always trying to read them. Do you know much about such things?"

"Nothing at all."

"Oh!" in a tone of disappointment. "I'm afraid you wouldn't get on with Mr. Pryor then."

"I'm afraid not."

"Perhaps you wouldn't care to look at them."

"Oh, let us look, by all means."

They walked together up the aisle. "I don't care about them," said Barbara, "but I suppose Mr. Pryor would die happy if he could make them out."

"Then I suspect he is happy meanwhile, though perhaps he doesn't know it," Reynold replied, looking upward at the half effaced lettering.

"He can read some of it," said the girl, "but nobody can make out the interesting part."

Harding laughed, under his breath. Their remarks had been softly uttered ever since the closing of the door had shut them in to the imprisoned silence. He moved noiselessly a few steps further, and looked round.

Mitchelhurst Church, like Mitchelhurst Place, betrayed a long neglect. The pavement was sunken and uneven, cobwebs hung from the sombre arches, the walls, which had once been white, were stained and streaked, by damp and time, to a blending of melancholy hues. The half light, which struggled through small panes of greenish glass, fell on things blighted, tarnished, faded, dim. The pews with their rush-matted seats were worm-eaten, the crimson velvet of the pulpit was a dingy rag. There was but one bit of vivid modern colouring in the whole building—a slim lancet window at the west end, a discord sharply struck in the shadowy harmony. "To the memory of the vicar before last," said Barbara, when the young man's glance fell on it. Such gleams of sunlight as lingered yet in the stormy sky without irradiated Michael, the church's patron saint, in the act of triumphing over a small dragon. The contest revealed itself as a mere struggle for existence; a Quaker, within such narrow limits, must have fought for the upper hand as surely as an archangel. Harding as he looked at it could not repress a sigh. He fully appreciated the calmness of the saint, and the neatness with which the little dragon was coiled, but it seemed to him a pity that the vicar before last had happened to die; and he was glad to turn his back on the battle, and follow Miss Strange to the north chancel aisle. "These are all the Rothwell monuments," she said. "Their vault is just below. This is their pew, where we sit on Sunday."

Having said this she moved from his side, and left him gazing at the simple tablets which recorded the later generations of the old house, and the elaborate memorials of more prosperous days. More than one recumbent figure slept there, each with upturned face supported on a carven pillow; the bust of a Rothwell was set up in a dusty niche, with lean features peering out of a forest of curling marble hair; carefully graduated families of Rothwells, boys and girls, knelt behind their kneeling parents; the little window, half blocked by the florid grandeur of a grimy monument, had the Rothwell arms emblazoned on it in a dim richness of colour. In this one spot the dreariness of the rest of the building became a stately melancholy. Harding looked down. His foot was resting on the inscribed stone which marked the entrance to that silent, airless place of skeletons and shadows, compared to which even this dim corner, with its mute assemblage, was yet the upper world of light and life. If he worked, if fortune favoured him, if he succeeded beyond all reasonable hope, if he were indeed predestined to triumph, that little stone might one day be lifted for him.

The windows darkened momentarily with the coming of the tempest. Through the dim diamond panes the masses of the yew-trees were seen, and their movement was like the stirring of vast black wings. The effigies of the dead men frowned in the deepening gloom, and their young descendant folded his arms, and leaned against the high pew, with a slant gleam of light on his pale Rothwell face. Barbara went restlessly and yet cautiously up and down the central aisle, and paused by the reading-desk to turn the leaves of the great old-fashioned prayer-book which lay there. When its cover was lifted it exhaled a faint odour, as of the dead Sundays of a century and more. While she lingered, lightly conscious of the lapse of vague years, reading petitions for the welfare of "Thy servant GEORGE, our most gracious King and Governour," "her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, and all the Royal Family," the page grew indistinct in the threatening twilight, as if it would withdraw itself from her idle curiosity. She looked up with a shiver, as overhead and around burst the multitudinous noises of the storm, the rain gushing on the leaden roof, the water streaming drearily from the gutters to beat on the earth below, and, in a few moments, the quick, monotonous fall of drops through a leak close by. This lasted for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Then the sky grew lighter, the downpour slackened, a sense of overshadowing oppression seemed to pass away, and St. Michael and his dragon brightened cheerfully. Barbara went to the door and threw it open, and a breath of fresh air came in with a chilly smell of rain.

As she stood in the low archway she heard Harding's step on the pavement behind her. It was more alert and decided than usual, and when she turned he met her glance with a smile.

"Well?" she said. "I didn't like to disturb you, you looked so serious."

"I was thinking," he admitted. "And it was a rather serious occasion. My people are not very cheerful company."

"And now you have thought?"

"Yes," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I have thought—seriously, with my serious friends yonder."

Barbara, as she stood, with her fingers closed on the heavy handle of the door, and her face turned towards Harding, fixed her eyes intently on his.

"I know!" she exclaimed. "You have made up your mind to come back to Mitchelhurst."

"Who knows?" said he. "I'm not sanguine, but we'll see what time and fortune have to say to it. At any rate my people are patient enough—they'll wait for me!"

To the girl, longing for a romance, the idea of the young man's resolution was delightful. She looked at him with a little quivering thrill of impatience, as if she would have had him do something towards the great end that very moment. Her small, uplifted face was flushed, and her eyes were like stars. The brightening light outside shone on the soft brown velvet of her dress, and something in her eager, lightly-poised attitude gave Reynold the impression of a dainty brown-plumaged, bright-eyed bird, ready for instant flight. He almost stretched an instinctive hand to grasp and detain her, lest she should loose her hold of the iron ring and be gone.

"I know you will succeed—you will come back!" she exclaimed. "How long first, I wonder?"

"Shall I succeed?" said Reynold, half to himself, but half-questioning her to win the sweet, unconscious assurance, which meant so little, yet mocked so deep a meaning.

"Yes!" she replied. "You will! You must be master here."

Master! She might have put it in a dozen different ways, and found no word to waken the swift, meaning flash in his eyes which that word did. Her pulses did not quicken, she perfectly understood that he was thinking of Mitchelhurst. She could not understand what mere dead earth and stone Mitchelhurst was to the man at her side.

"You will have to restore the church one of these days," she said.

Harding nodded.

"Certainly. But it will be very ugly, anyhow."

"Well, at least you must have the roof mended. And now, please, will you get the key? It is on the ledge of that pew just across the aisle. I think we had better be going—it has almost left off raining."

She stepped outside and put up her umbrella, while he locked up his ancestors, smiling grimly. It seemed rather unnecessary to turn the key on the family party in that dusty little corner. They were quiet folks, and, as he had said, they would wait for him and his fortune not impatiently. If he could have shut in the brightness of youth, the warmth and life and sweetness which alone could make the fortune worth having, if he could have come back in the hour of success to unfasten the door and find all there—then indeed his big key would have been a priceless talisman. Unfortunately one can shut nothing safely away that is not dead. The old Rothwells were secure enough, but the rest was at the mercy of time and change, and all the winds that blow.

The pair were silent as they turned into Mitchelhurst Street. Reynold looked at the small, shabby houses, and noted the swinging sign of the "Rothwell Arms," though his deeper thoughts were full of other things. But about half way through the village he awoke to a sudden consciousness of eyes. Eyes peered through small-paned windows, stared boldly from open doorways, met him inquisitively in the faces of loiterers on the path, or were lifted from the dull task of mending the road as he walked by with Barbara. He looked over his shoulder and found that other people were looking over their shoulders, after which he felt himself completely encompassed.

"People here seem interested," he remarked to Miss Strange, while a pale-faced, slatternly girl, with swiftly-plaiting fingers, leaned forward to get a better view.

"Why, of course they are interested. You are a stranger, you know. It is quite an excitement for them."

"You call that an excitement?" said he.

"Yes. If you spent your life straw-plaiting in one of these cottages you would be excited if a stranger went by. It would be kinder of you if you did not walk so fast."

"No, no," said Harding, quickening his steps. "I don't profess philanthropy."

"Besides, you are not altogether a stranger," she went on. "I dare say they think you are one of the old family come to buy up the property."

"Why should they think anything of the kind?" he demanded incredulously.

"Well, they know you are staying at the Place. Every child in the street knows that. And, you see, Mr. Harding, nobody comes to Mitchelhurst without some special reason, so perhaps they have a right to be curious. I remember how they stared a few months ago—it was at a gentleman who was just walking down the road——"

"Indeed," said Harding. "And what was his special reason for coming? I suppose," he added quickly, "I've as good a right to be curious as other Mitchelhurst people."

"Oh, I don't know. He was a friend of Uncle Herbert's—he came to see him."

"And did he walk slowly from motives of pure kindness?" the young man persisted.

"Yes," said Barbara defiantly. "He stood stock still and looked at the straw plaiting. I don't know about the kindness; perhaps he liked it."

"Well, I don't like it."

"But you needn't take such very long steps: these three cottages are the last. Do you know I'm very nearly running?"

Of course he slackened his pace and begged her pardon; but in so doing he relapsed into the uneasy self-consciousness of their first interview. When they reached the gate of the avenue he held it open for her to pass, murmuring something about walking a bit further. Barbara looked at him in surprise, and then, with a little smiling nod, went away under the trees, wondering what was amiss. "I can't have offended him—how could I?" she said to herself, and she made up her mind that her new friend was certainly queer. It was the Rothwell temper, no doubt, and yet his awkward muttering had been more like the manner of a sullen schoolboy. A Rothwell should have been loftily superior, even if he were disagreeable. It was true, as Barbara reflected, almost in spite of herself, that Mr. Harding had no such hereditary obligation on the pork-butcher side of his pedigree.

Reynold had spoken out of the bitterness of his heart, and a bitter frankness is the frankest of all. But perhaps he had not shown his wisdom when he so quickly confided his grandfather to Miss Strange. Because we may have tact enough to choose the mood in which our friend shall listen to our secret, we are a little too apt to forget that the secret, once uttered, remains with him in all his moods. In this case the girl had been a sympathetic listener, but young Harding scarcely intended that the elder Reynold should be so vividly realised.

Later, when all outside the windows was growing blank and black, Barbara went up to dress for dinner. She was nearly ready when there came a knock at her door, and she hurried, candle in hand, to open it. In the gloom of the passage stood the red-armed village girl who waited on her.

"Please, miss, the gentleman told me to give you this," said the messenger, awkwardly offering something which was only a formless mass in the darkness.

"What?" said Miss Strange, and turned the light upon it. The wavering little illumination fell on a confusion of autumn leaves, rich with their dying colours, and shining with rain. Among them, indistinctly, were berries of various kinds, hips and haws, and poison clusters of a deeper red, vanishing for a moment as the draught blew the candle flame aside, and then reappearing. One might have fancied them blood drops newly shed on the wet foliage.

"Oh!" Barbara exclaimed in surprise, and after a moment's pause, "give them to me." She gathered them up, despite some thorny stems, with her disengaged hand, and went back into her room. So that was the meaning of Mr. Harding's solitary walk! She stood by the table, delicately picking out the most vivid clusters, and trying their effect against the soft cloud of her hair, cloudier than ever in the dusk of her mirror. "I hope he hasn't been slipping into any more ditches!" she said to herself.

With that she sighed, for the thought recalled to her the melancholy of an autumnal landscape. She remembered an earlier gift, roses and myrtle, a summer gift, the giver of which had gone when the summer waned. She had seen him last on a hot September day. "We never said good-bye," Barbara thought, and let her hand hang with the berries in it. "He said he should not go till the beginning of October. When he came that afternoon and I was out, and he only saw uncle, I was sure he would come again. Well, I suppose he didn't care to. He could if he liked—a girl can't; there are lots of things a girl can't do; but a man can call if he pleases. Well, he must have gone away before now. And he didn't even write a line, he only sent a message by uncle, his kind regards—Who wants his kind regards?—and he was sorry not to see me. Very well, my kind regards, and I'm sure I don't want to see him!"

She ended her meditations with an emphatic little nod, but the girl in the mirror who returned it had such a defiantly pouting face that she quite took Barbara by surprise.

"I'm not angry," Miss Strange declared to herself after a pause. "Not the least in the world. The idea is perfectly absurd. It was just a bit of the summer, and now the summer is gone." And so saying she put Mr. Harding's autumn berries in her hair, and fastened them at her throat, and, with her candle flickering dimly through the long dark passages, swept down to the yellow drawing-room to thank him for his gift.