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Philippa—I know that’s what you’re doing.”

      The girl with the figure of a boy let her eyes meet Adrian’s and Nance felt the dead weight in her heart grow more ice-cold than before, as she watched the effect of that look upon her lover.

      It was Rachel who broke the tension. “It wasn’t so very long ago,” she said, “that Rodmoor was quite an inland place. There are houses now, they say, and churches under the water. And it swallows up the land all the time, inch by inch. The sand-dunes are much nearer the town, I am sure of that, and the mouth of the river, too, than when I lived here in old days.”

      Mrs. Renshaw looked by no means pleased at this speech.

      “Well,” she said, “we must be getting home for dinner. Shall we walk through the park, Philippa? It’s the nicest way—if the grass isn’t too wet.”

      In the general chorus of adieus that followed, Nance was not surprised when Sorio bade good-night to her as well as to the others. He professed to be going to the station to meet the Mundham train.

      “Baltazar will have a lot of things to carry,” he said, “and I must be at hand to help.”

      Mrs. Renshaw pressed Linda’s hand very tenderly as they parted and a cynical observer might have been pardoned for suspecting that under the suppressed sigh with which she took Philippa’s arm there lurked a wish that it had been the more docile and less difficult child that fate had given her for a daughter.

      Linda, at any rate, proved to be full of enthusiastic and excited praise for the sad-voiced lady, as the sisters went off with Rachel. She chattered, indeed, so incessantly about her that Nance, whose nerves were in no tolerant state, broke out at last into a quite savage protest.

      “She’s the sort of person,” she threw in, “who’s always sentimental about young girls. Wait till you find her with some one younger than you are, and you’ll soon see! Am I not right, Rachel?”

      “She’s not right at all, is she?” interposed the other. Miss Doorm looked at them gravely.

      “I don’t think either of you understand Mrs. Renshaw. Indeed there aren’t many who do. She’s had troubles such as you may both pray to God you’ll never know. That wisp of a girl will be the cause of others before long.”

      She glanced at Nance significantly.

      “Hold tight to your Adrian, my love. Hold tight to him, my dearie!”

      Thus, as they emerged upon the tow path spoke Rachel Doorm.

      Meanwhile, from his watch above the Inn, the nameless Admiral saw the shadows of night settle down upon his sycamores. His faded countenance, with its defiant bravado, stared insolently at what he could catch between trees and houses, of the darkening harbour and if Rodmoor had been a ship instead of a village, and he a figurehead instead of a sign-board, he could not have confronted the unknown and all that the unknown might bring more indifferently, more casually, more contemptuously.

IV

       OAKGUARD

       Table of Contents

      The night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the daughter of the house of Renshaw restless and wakeful. She listened to the hall clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that would have suggested to any one observing her that she had only been waiting for that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal enterprise fraught with both sweetness and peril.

      The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy curtains were drawn but the window, wide-open behind them, let in a breath of rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver candles on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a dying fire.

      A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the fireplace.

      As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and erect, her hands clasped behind her head, before this mirror. The firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and slender neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and this, added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the appearance of one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art whose ambiguous loveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble, with so touching an appeal. Her smooth forehead and small delicately moulded face showed phantom-like in the mirror. Her scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at herself, quivered into that enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable which seems, more than any other human expression, to have haunted the imagination of certain great artists of the past.

      Permitted for a brief moment to catch a glimpse of that white figure, an intruder, if possessed of the smallest degree of poetic fancy, would have been tempted to dream that the dust of the centuries had indeed been quickened and some delicate evocation of perverse pagan desire restored to breath and consciousness.

      Such a dream would not, perhaps, have survived a glance at the girl’s face. With distended pupils and irises so large that they might have been under the influence of some exciting drug, her eyes had that particular look, sorrowful and heavy with mystery, which one feels could not have been in the world before the death of Christ.

      With her epicene figure, she resembled some girl-priestess of Artemis invoking a mocking image of her own defiant sexlessness. With her sorrowful inhuman eyes she suggested some strange elf-creature, born of mediæval magic.

      Turning away from the mirror, Philippa Renshaw blew out the candles and flung open the curtains. Standing thus for a moment in the presence of the vague starless night full of chilly earth odours, she drew several long deep breaths and seemed to inhale the very essence of the darkness as if it had been the kiss of some elemental lover. Then she shivered a little, closed the window and began hurriedly to dress herself by the firelight. Bare-headed, but with a dark cloak reaching to her feet, she softly left her room and crept silently down the staircase. One by one she drew the heavy bolts of the hall door and turned the ponderous key.

      Letting herself out into the night air with the movements of one not unaccustomed to such escapades, she hurried down the stone pathway, passed through the iron entrance gates, and emerged into the park. Catching up the skirt of her cloak, and drawing it tightly round her so that it should not impede her steps, she plunged into the wet grass and directed her course towards the thickest group of oak trees. Between the immense trunks and mossy roots of these sea-deformed and wind-stunted children of the centuries she groped her way, her feet stumbling over fallen branches and her face whipped by the young wet leaves.

      A mad desire seemed to possess her, to throw off every vestige and token of her human imprisonment and to pass forth free and unfettered into the embrace of the primeval powers. One would have thought, to have watched her as she flung herself, at last, on her face under one of the oldest of the trees and liberating her arms from her cloak, stretched them round its trunk, that she was some worshipper of a banished divinity invoking her god while her persecutors slept, and passionately calling upon him to return to his forsaken shrine. Releasing her fierce clasp upon the rough bark of the tree, not however before it had bruised her flesh, the girl dug her nails into the soft damp leaf-mould and rubbed her forehead against the wet moss. She shuddered as she lay like this, and as she shuddered she clutched yet more tightly, as if in a kind of ecstasy, the roots of grass and the rubble of earth into which her fingers dug.

      Meanwhile, within the house, another little drama unrolled itself. In the old-fashioned library collected by many generations of Renshaws, where the noble Rabelaisian taste of the eighteenth century jostled unceremoniously with the attenuated banalities of a later epoch, there sat, at the very moment when the girl descended the stairs, a tall powerfully built man in evening dress.

      Brand Renshaw was a figure of striking and formidable appearance. Immensely

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