to the pot house—you—your mother's son—while I live in the Rothwells' old home. It is impossible—I cannot suffer it. I should be for ever ashamed and humiliated if you refused a few days' shelter under the old roof. I should indeed."

"If you put it so——"

"There is no other way to put it."

"I can say no more. I can only thank you for your kindness. I will come," said Reynold Harding, slowly. Urgent as the invitation was, and simply as it was accepted, there was yet a curious want of friendliness about it. Circumstances constrained these two men, not any touch of mutual liking. One would have said that Mr. Hayes was bound to insist and Harding to yield.

"That is settled then," said the elder man, "and we shall see you to-morrow. I am a good deal engaged myself, but Barbara is quite at home in Mitchelhurst, and can show you all the Rothwell memorials—the Rothwells are the romance of Mitchelhurst, you know. She'll be delighted to do the honours, eh, Barbara?"

The girl murmured a shy answer.

"Oh, if I trespass on your kindness I think that's enough; I needn't victimise Miss Strange," said the young man, and he laughed a little, not altogether pleasantly. "And I can't claim any of the romance. My name isn't Rothwell."

"The name isn't everything," said Mr. Hayes. "Come, Barbara, it's getting late, and I want my dinner. Till to-morrow, then," and he held out his hand to their new acquaintance.

Young Harding bowed stiffly to Barbara. "Till to-morrow afternoon."

The old man and the girl walked away, he with an elderly sprightliness of bearing which seemed to say, "See how active I still am!" she moving by his side with dreamy, unconscious grace. They came to a curve in the road, and she turned her head and looked back before she passed it. Mr. Reynold Harding had taken but a couple of steps from the spot where they had left him. He had apparently arranged his bandage to his satisfaction at last, and was pulling at the knot with his teeth and his other hand, but his face was towards them, and Barbara knew that he saw that backward glance. She quickened her steps in hot confusion, and looked straight before her for at least five minutes.

During that time it was her uncle who was the hero of her thoughts. His dramatic recognition of Harding and Harding's ring, his absolute refusal to permit the young man to go to any house in Mitchelhurst but the Place, something in the tone of his voice when he uttered his "thirty years ago," hinted a romance to Barbara. The conjecture might or might not be correct, but at any rate it was natural. Girls who do not understand love are apt to use it to explain all the other things they do not understand. She waited till her cheeks were cool, and her thoughts clear, and then she spoke.

"I didn't know you knew the Rothwells so well, uncle."

"My dear," said her uncle, "how should you?"

"I suppose you might have talked about them."

"I might," said Mr. Hayes. "Now you mention it, I might, certainly. But I haven't any especial fancy for the gossip of the last generation."

"Well, I have," said the girl. And after a moment she went on. "How long is it since they left the Place?"

Her uncle put his head on one side with a quick, birdlike movement, and apparently referred to a cloud in the western sky before he made answer.

"Nineteen years last Midsummer."

"And when did you take it?"

"A year later."

The two walked a little way in silence, and then Barbara recommenced.

"This Mr. Harding—he is like the Rothwells, then?"

"Rothwell from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. The old people, who knew the family, will find him out as he walks through the village—see if they don't. The same haughty, sulky, sneering way with him, and just the same voice. Only every Rothwell at the Place, even to the last, had an air of being a grand seigneur, which this fellow can't very well have. Upon my word, I begin to think it was the pleasantest thing about them. I don't like a pride which is conscious of being homeless and out at elbows."

Barbara undauntedly pursued her little romance.

"You are talking about the men," she said. "Is Mr. Harding like his mother?"

"Well, she was a handsome woman," Mr. Hayes replied indifferently, "but she had the same unpleasant manner."

The girl was thrown back on an utter blankness of ideas. A woman beloved may have a dozen faults, and be the dearer for them; but she cannot possibly have an unpleasant manner. Barbara could frame no theory to fit the perplexing facts.

As they turned into the one street of Mitchelhurst, Mr. Hayes spoke musingly.

"To-morrow afternoon, Barbara, let that young man have the blue room—the large room. You know which I mean?"

"Yes, uncle."

"See that everything is nice and in order. And, Barbara——"

"Yes, uncle," said Barbara again, for he paused.

"Mr. Reynold Harding will probably look down on you. I suspect he thinks that you and I are about fit to black his boots. Be civil, of course, but you needn't do it."

"I'm sure I don't want," said the girl quietly; "and at that rate I should hope he would come with them tolerably clean to-morrow."

Mr. Hayes laughed suddenly, showing his teeth.

"By Jove!" he said, "they were dirty enough this afternoon!"

"In my service," said Barbara. "Now I come to think of it, it seems to me that I ought to clean them."

"Nonsense!" her uncle exclaimed, still smiling at the remembrance. "And you saw him roll into the ditch?—Barbara, the poor fellow must hate you like poison!"

She looked down as she walked, drawing her delicate brows a little together.

"I dare say he does," she said softly, as if to herself.

Between ten and eleven that evening Mr. Reynold Harding sat by his fireside, staring at the red coals as they faded drearily into ashes. Being duly washed and brushed, he showed but slight traces of his accident. The scratches on his face were not deep, and his torn hand was mended with little strips of black plaster. Intently as he seemed to think, his thoughts were not definite. Had he been questioned concerning them he could have answered only "Mitchelhurst." Anger, tenderness, curiosity, pride, and bitter self-contempt were mixed in silent strife in the shadows of his soul. The memory of the Rothwells had drawn him on his pilgrimage—a vain, hopeless, barren memory, and yet the best he had. He had intended to wander about the village, to look from a distance at the Rothwells' house, to stand by the Rothwells' graves in the churchyard, and to laugh at his own folly as he did so. And now he was to sleep under their roof, to know the very rooms where they had lived and died, and for this he was to thank these strangers who played at hospitality in the old home. He thought of the morrow with curious alternations of distaste and eagerness.

Mr Hayes, meanwhile, with the lamplight shining on his white hair, was studying a paper in the Transactions of the County Archæological Society, "On an Inscription in Mitchelhurst Church." Mr Hayes had a theory of his own on the subject, and smiled over the vicar's view with the tranquil enjoyment of unalloyed contempt.

And Barbara, in the silence of her room, opposite a dimly-lighted mirror, sat brushing her shadowy hair, whose waves seemed to melt into the dusk about the pale reflection of her face. As she gazed at it she was