The Squire was late.

A hundred years ago night fell more seriously. It closed in on a countryside less peopled, on houses and hamlets more distant, and divided by greater risks of flood and field. The dark hours were longer and haunted by graver apprehensions. Every journey had to be made on horses or behind them, roads were rough and miry, fords were plenty, bridges scarce. Sturdy rogues abounded, and to double every peril it was still the habit of most men to drink deep. Few returned sober from market, fewer from fair or merry-making.

For many, therefore, the coming of night meant the coming of fear. Children, watching the great moths fluttering against the low ceiling, or round the rush-light that cast such gloomy shadows, thought that their elders would never come upstairs to bed. Lone women, quaking in remote dwellings, remembered the gibbet where the treacherous inn-keeper still moulded, and fancied every creak the coming of a man in a crape mask. Thousands suffered nightly because the goodman lingered abroad, or the son was absent, and in many a window the light was set at dusk to guide the master by the pool. On market evenings women stole trembling down the lane that the sound of wheels might the sooner dispel their fears.

At Garth it was youth not age that first caught the alarm. For Josina's conscience troubled her, and before even Miss Peacock, most fidgety of old maids, had seen cause to fear, the girl was standing in the darkness before the door, listening and uneasy. The Squire was seldom late; it could not be that Clement had met him and there had been a--but no, Clement was not the man to raise his hand against his elder--the thought was dismissed as soon as formed. Yet why did not the Squire come? Lights began to shine through the casements, she saw the candles brought into the dining-room, the darkness thickened about her, only the trunks of the nearer beeches gave back a gleam. And she felt that if anything had happened to him she could never forgive herself. Shivering, less with cold than with apprehension, she peered down the drive. He had been later than this before, but then her conscience had been quiet, she had not deceived him, she had had nothing with which to reproach herself on his account.

Presently, "Josina, what are you doing there?" Miss Peacock cried. She had come to the open door and discovered the girl. She began to scold. "Come in this minute, child! What are you starving the house for, standing there?"

But Josina did not budge. "He is very late," she said.

"Late? What nonsense! And what if he is late? What good can you do, standing out there? I declare one might suppose your father was one of those skimble-skambles that can't pass a tavern door, to hear you talk! And Thomas with him! Come in at once when I tell you! As if I should not be the first to cry out if anything were wrong. Late indeed--why, goodness gracious, I declare it's nearly eight. What can have become of him, child? And Calamy and those good-for-nothing girls warming their knees at the fire, and no more caring if their master is in the river than--Josina, do you hear? Do you know that your father is still out? Calamy!" ringing a hand-bell that stood on the table in the hall, "Calamy! Are you all asleep? Don't you know that your master is not in, and it is nearly eight?"

Calamy was the butler. A tall, lanthorn-jawed man, he would have looked lugubrious in the King's scarlet which he had once worn; in his professional black, or in his shirt sleeves, cleaning plate, he was melancholy itself. And his modes and manners were at least as mournful as his aspect--no man so sure as "Old Calamity" to see the dark side of things or to put it before others. It was whispered that he had been a Dissenter, and why the Squire, who hated a ranter as he hated the devil, had ever engaged him, much less kept him, was a puzzle to Garthmyle. That he had been his son's servant and had been with the boy when he died, might have seemed a sufficient reason, had the Squire been other than he was. But no one supposed that such a thing weighed with the old man--he was of too hard a grain. Yet at Garth, Calamy had lived for a score of years, and been suffered with a patience which might have stood to the credit of more reasonable men.

"Nearly eight!" Miss Peacock flung at him, and repeated her statement.

"We've put the dinner back, ma'am."

"Put the dinner back! And that's all you think of, when at any minute your master--oh, dear, dear, what can have happened to him?"

"Well, it's a dark night, ma'am, to be sure."

"Gracious goodness, can't I see that? If Thomas weren't with him----"

The butler shook his head. "Under notice, ma'am," he said. "I think the worst of Thomas. On a dark night, with Thomas----"

Miss Peacock gasped.

"I should say my prayers, ma'am," the butler murmured softly.

Miss Peacock stared, aghast. "Under notice?" she cried. "Well, of all the--'deed, and I wish you were all under notice, if that is the best you've got to say."

"Hadn't you better," said Josina from the darkness outside, "send Fewtrell to meet him with a lanthorn?"

"And get my nose bitten off when your father comes home! La, bless me, I don't know what to do! And no one else to do a thing!"

"Send him, Calamy," said Josina.

Calamy retired. Miss Peacock looked out, a shawl about her head. "Jos! Where are you?" she cried. "Come in at once, girl. Do you think I am going to be left alone, and the door open? Jos! Jos!"

But Josina was gone, groping her way down the drive. When Fewtrell followed with his lanthorn he came on her sitting on the bridge, and he got a rare start, thinking it was a ghost. "Lord A'mighty!" he cried as the light fell on her pale face. "Aren't you afraid to sit there by yourself, miss?"

But Josina was not afraid, and after a word or two he shambled away, the lanthorn swinging in his hand. The girl watched the light go bobbing along as far the highway fifty yards on, saw it travel to the left along the road, lost it for some moments, then marked it again, a faint blur of light, moving towards the village.

Presently it vanished and she was left alone with her fears. She strained her ears to catch the first sound of wheels. The stream murmured beneath her, a sick sheep coughed, the breeze whispered in the hedges, the cry of an owl, thrice repeated, sank into silence. But that was all, and in the presence of the silent world about her, of the all-enveloping night, of the solemn stars shining as they had shone from eternity, the girl knew herself infinitely helpless, without remedy against the stroke of impending fate. She recognized that lighted rooms and glowing fires and the indoor life did but deceive; that they did but blind the mind to the immensity of things, to the real issues, to life and death and eternity. Anguished, she owned that a good conscience was the only refuge, and that she had it not. She had deceived her father, and it would be her fate to endure a lasting remorse. At last, her eyes opened, she fancied that she detected behind the mask a father's face. But too late, for the bridge which he had crossed innumerable times, the drive, rough and rutted, yet the harbinger of home, which he had climbed from boyhood to age, the threshold which he had trodden so often as master--they would know him no more! At the thought she broke down and wept, feeling all its poignancy, all its pitifulness, and finding for the moment no support in Clement, no recompense in a love which deceit and secrecy had tainted.

Doubtless she would not have taken things so hardly had she not been overwrought; and, as it was, the first sound that reached her from the Garthmyle road brought her to her feet. A light showed, moving from that direction, travelling slowly through the darkness. It vanished, and she held her breath. It came into view again, and she groped her way forward until she stood in the road. The light was close at hand now, though viewed from the............