To spend one's days perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man's mind and lead it to gloomy workings. To know the existence of a hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold¹ not—is an eerie² and unwholesome thing. Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber³ in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able to communicate with the remote servants' quarters below stairs, where lay the one man and one woman who attended him. When he came late to his room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering⁴ candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it was only a more profound and insistent⁵ thing than the silence of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a presence. He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact that at certain times the fantasy was half believable—that there were things which walked about softly at night—things which did not want to be dead. He himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the gallery—pretty, light, petulant⁶ women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men. His theory was that they hated their stone coffins⁷, and fought their way back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and to be seen of warm things which were alive. But it was not to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when they beat upon closed doors they would not open. Still they came back—came back. And sometimes there was a rustle⁸ and a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.  
“Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been as I am,” he had said one black night, when he had sat in his room staring at the floor. “If a man was dragged out when he had not LIVED a day, he would come back I should come back if—God! A man COULD not be dragged away—like THIS!”
 
And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely thing—a lonely thing.
 
But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months his had strangely intensified¹⁰ itself. This, though he was not aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the completing parts of him were within reach—and without it. When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table, round which twenty people might have laughed and talked. Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days when he was not out of doors. Since he could not afford servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed. It was a ghastly and melancholy¹¹ thing to make, as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments. He was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments of decay. To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a support put there, seemed decent things to do.
 
“Whom am I doing it for?” he said to Mr. Penzance. “I am doing it for myself—because I cannot help it. The place seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior¹² come to the end of his days. It has stood the war of things for century after century—the war of things. It is going now I am all that is left to it. It is all I have. So I patch it up when I can afford it, with a crutch¹³ or a splint and a bandage.”
 
Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous¹⁴ bulk against a chrysoprase and pink horizon. It was the kind of cloud which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or even casually¹⁵ consider them. So Lady Anstruthers felt some surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the coming storm.
 
“Nigel will be caught in the rain,” she said to her sister. “I wonder why he goes out now. It would be better to wait until to-morrow.”
 
But Sir Nigel did not think so. He had calculated matters with some nicety. He was not exactly on such terms with Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely¹⁶ natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual call and in an unpremeditated manner. He meant to reach the Mount about the time the storm broke, under which circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.
 
Mount Dunstan was in the library. He had sat smoking his pipe while he watched the purple cloud roll up and spread itself, blotting¹⁷ out the chrysoprase and pink and blue, and when the branches of the trees began to toss about he had looked on with pleasure as the rush of big rain drops came down and pelted¹⁸ things. It was a fine storm, and there were some imposing¹⁹ claps of thunder and jagged flashes of lightning. As one splendid rattle²⁰ shook the air he was surprised to hear a summons at the great hall door. Who on earth could be turning up at this time? His man Reeve announced the arrival a few moments later, and it was Sir Nigel Anstruthers. He had, he explained, been riding through the village when the deluge²¹ descended²², and it had occurred to him to turn in at the park gates and ask a temporary shelter. Mount Dunstan received him with sufficient courtesy. His appearance was not a thing to rejoice over, but it could be endured. Whisky and soda²³ and a smoke would serve to pass the hour, if the storm lasted so long.
 
Conversation was not the easiest thing in the world under the circumstances, but Sir Nigel led the way steadily²⁴ after he had taken his seat and accepted the hospitalities offered. What a place it was—this! He had been struck for the hundredth time with the impressiveness of the mass of it, the sweep of the park and the splendid grouping of the timber, as he had ridden up the avenue. There was no other place like it in the county. Was there another like it in England?
 
“Not in its case, I hope,” Mount Dunstan said.
 
There were a few seconds of silence. The rain poured down in splashing sheets and was swept in rattling²⁶ gusts²⁷ against the window panes²⁸.
 
“What the place needs is—an heiress,” Anstruthers observed in the tone of a practical man. “I believe I have heard that your views of things are such that she should preferably NOT be an American.”
 
Mount Dunstan did not smile, though he slightly showed his teeth.
 
“When I am driven to the wall,” he answered, “I may not be fastidious as to nationality.”
 
Nigel Anstruthers' manner was not a bad one. He chose that tone of casual openness which, while it does not wholly commit itself, may be regarded as suggestive of the amiable²⁹ half confidence of speeches made as “man to man.”
 
“My own opportunity of studying the genus American heiress within my own gates is a first-class one. I find that it knows what it wants and that its intention is to get it.” A short laugh broke from him as he flicked³⁰ the ash from his cigar on to the small bronze receptacle at his elbow. “It is not many years since it would have been difficult for a girl to be frank enough to say, 'When I marry I shall ask something in exchange for what I have to give.'”
 
“There are not many who have as much to give,” said Mount Dunstan coolly.
 
“True,” with a slight shrug³¹. “You are thinking that men are glad enough to take a girl like that—even one who has not a shape like Diana's and eyes like the sea. Yes, by George,” softly, and narrowing his lids, “she IS a handsome creature.”
 
Mount Dunstan did not attempt to refute the statement, and Anstruthers laughed low again.
 
“It is an asset she knows the value of quite clearly. That is the interesting part of it. She has inherited the far-seeing commercial mind. She does not object to admitting it. She educated herself in delightful³² cold blood that she might be prepared for the largest prize appearing upon the horizon. She held things in view when she was a child at school, and obviously attacked her French, German, and Italian conjugations with a twelve-year-old eye on the future.”
 
Mount Dunstan leaning back carelessly in his chair, laughed—as it seemed—with him. Internally he was saying that the man was a liar³³ who might always be trusted to lie, but he knew with shamed fury that the lies were doing something to his soul—rolling dark vapours over it—stinging him, dragging away props³⁴, and making him feel they had been foolish things to lean on. This can always be done with a man in love who has slight foundation for hope. For some mysterious and occult reason civilisation³⁵ has elected to treat the strange and great passion as if it were an unholy and indecent thing, whose dominion³⁶ over him proper social training prevents any man from admitting openly. In passing through its cruelest phases he must bear himself as if he were immune, and this being the custom, he may be called upon to endure much without the relief of striking out with manly³⁷ blows. An enemy guessing his case and possessing the infernal gift whose joy is to dishearten and do hurt with courteous³⁸ despitefulness, may plant a poisoned arrow here and there with neatness and fine touch, while his bound victim can, with decency³⁹, neither start, nor utter brave howls, nor guard himself, but must sit still and listen, hospitably⁴⁰ supplying smoke and drink and being careful not to make an ass⁹ of himself.
 
Therefore Mount Dunstan pushed the cigars nearer to his visitor and waved his hand hospitably towards the whisky and soda. There was no reason, in fact, why Anstruthers—or any one indeed, but Penzance, should suspect that he had become somewhat mad in secret. The man's talk was marked merely by the lightly disparaging⁴² malice⁴³ which was rarely to be missed from any speech of his which touched on others. Yet it might have been a thing arranged beforehand, to suggest adroitly⁴⁴ either lies or truth which would make a man see every sickeningly good reason for feeling that in this contest he did not count for a man at all.
 
“It has all been pretty obvious,” said Sir Nigel. “There is a sort of cynicism in the openness of the siege. My impression is that almost every youngster who has met her has taken a shot. Tommy Alanby scrambling⁴⁵ up from his knees in one of the rose-gardens was a satisfying sight. His much-talked-of-passion for Jane Lithc............