Thus he argued, pretending to himself the while that he was merely playing with his fancy, pursuing it like a ball in a game, and ready to let it fall and lie the moment that he was tired. But the sudden hum of a motor-car upon his drive, and a joyous outcry of voices, soon dispelled the pretence. A party of his friends invaded him, clamouring for luncheon, and in his mind there sprang up a fear so strong that it surprised him. They would thicken the thinning curtain between himself and her whose hand had lain upon the table. They would drag him back into his own century. The whole process of isolation would have to begin again. The talk at luncheon was all of regattas and the tonnage of yachts. Caston sat at the table with his fear increasing. His visitors were friends he would have welcomed five weeks ago, and he would have gaily taken his part in their light talk. Now it was every moment on his lips to cry out:

"Hold your tongues and go!"

They went off at three o'clock, and a lady of the party wisely nodded a dainty head at him as he stood upon the steps, and remarked:

"You hated us visiting you, Mr. Caston. You have someone in that house--someone you won't show to us."

Caston coloured to the roots of his hair.

The lady laughed. "There--I knew I was right! Let me guess who it can be."

Caston raised his head in a quick protest.

"No, there is no one." He tried to laugh easily. "That's my trouble.

There is no one, I am afraid."

They had driven his visitor away, without a doubt; and though he sat very still in his arm-chair that night, careful as a hunter by no abrupt movement to scare away his quarry, he sat undisturbed. He waited until the light was grey and the birds singing upon the lawn.

He went to bed disappointed as a lover whose mistress had failed to keep her tryst.

On the next day he searched for and found the catalogue of the sale at which he had bought the table. The sale had been held at a house called Bylanes, some five miles from the Beaulieu river, and the furniture was advertised as the property of Geoffrey Trimingham, Esq., deceased, and sold by his young widow. Caston's memory was quickened by these meagre details. He recollected stories which he had heard during the three days of the sale. The Triminghams were a branch of the old Norfolk family of that name, and had settled in the New Forest so far back as the reign of the first George. Geoffrey Trimingham, however, had delayed marriage until well sped in years, and then had committed the common fault of marrying a young woman, who, with no children and no traditions to detain her in a neighbourhood which she considered gloomy, had, as soon as she was free, sold off house and furniture--lock, stock, and barrel--so that she might retire to what she considered the more elegant neighbourhood of Blandford Square.

This was all very well, but it did not bring Harry Gaston very much nearer to the identification of his visitor. She was a Trimingham, probably, but even that was by no means certain; and to what generation of Triminghams she belonged, he knew no more than he knew her Christian name. He searched the house for the keys of the table, but nowhere could he find them. He had never opened the drawers, he had never raised the lid. It seemed to him that he must have bought the table without the keys at all.

He might have broken it open, of course, and from time to time, as the evenings pa.s.sed in an expectation which was not fulfilled, he was tempted to take a chisel in his hand and set to work. But he resisted.

The table was not his. It was _hers_, and in her presence alone it must be opened.

Thus Caston pa.s.sed a week, and then one evening there fell a shadow across the open page of his book. He looked swiftly up. He saw nothing but the empty room, and the flame of the lamp burned bright and steady. She was here, then, and as the conviction grew within him to a veritable exultation, he was aware of rustling of a woman's gown. The sound came from behind him. He turned with a leap of his heart, and saw her--saw her from the crown of her small head, with its thick brown hair, to the hem of her dress--not a shadow, not a vague shape dimly to be apprehended, but as actual as flesh and blood could be.

She was dressed in a gown of pale blue satin of an ancient mode, and was slender as a child. Her face, too, was the face of one little more than a child, though pain and trouble had ravaged it.

She stood as though she had just stepped from the garden on to the window-seat, and so to the floor, and in her dark eyes there was a look of the direst urgency. She moved swiftly across the room to the table, pulled at the gla.s.s handles, and sought to lift the lid, and all in a feverish haste, with her young and troubled face twitching as though she were at pains to check her tears. Caston watched her eagerly. He noticed that once more her left hand was pressed flat upon the lid, as she tried to open the drawer, and then a flash of gold caught and held his eyes. Young though she was, she wore a wedding-ring. He had barely noticed it, when she turned from the table and came straight towards him. Caston rose from his chair. He heard himself saying once more:

"Can I help?"

But this time he did not laugh upon the words. She stood before him with so pitiful an appeal, her hands clutched together in front of her, her face convulsed. He spoke with the deference due to those who have greatly suffered. Then came to him a whisper in reply, so low that he barely heard it--so low that perhaps he only imagined it.

"Yes."

Caston went across to the table, and, opening his knife, inserted it under the lid. The girl stood at his side, a gleam of hope in her eyes. Caston ran the blade of the knife along to the lock and turned it, prising up the lid. There was a sound of the splitting of wood, and the lock gave. Caston lifted the lid. It rose on hinges, and had upon the under-side a bevelled mirror, and it disclosed, when open, a fixed tray lined with blue velvet. The tray was empty.

But now that the lid was raised in the centre of the table, the side-pieces could be opened too. The girl opened the one at her hand.

Caston saw a well, lined, like the rest, with velvet, and filled with the knick-knacks and belongings of a girl. She took them out hurriedly, heaping them together on the tray--a walnut-wood housewife shaped and shut like a large card-case, with scissors, thimble, needle-case, tiny penknife, all complete--for she opened it, as she opened everything in the haste and urgency of her search--a large needle-case of ivory, a walnut-wood egg, which unscrewed and showed within a reel with silk still wound upon it, and a little oval box with a label on the top of it, and the royal arms. Caston read the label:

STRINGER'S CANDY.

PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR, R. STRINGER, DRUGGIST TO THE KING.

The top fell from the little box, and a shower of sh.e.l.ls rattled out of it. Bags of beads followed, wash-leather bags carefully tied up, and some of them filled with the minutest of beads. It made Caston's eyes ache to think of anyone stringing them together. In the end the well was emptied, and, with a gesture of despair, the girl slipped round to the other side of Caston. She turned back the flap upon this side.

On the other side were the implements of work; here was the finished product. She lifted out two small anti-maca.s.sars, completely made up of tiny beads in crystal and turquoise colours, and worked in the most intricate patterns. They were extraordinarily heavy, and must have taken months in the making. Under these were still more beads, in boxes and in bags and coiled in long strings. She heaped them out upon the tray, and looked into the well. Her face flashed into relief. She thrust her hands in; she drew out from the very bottom a faded bundle of letters. She clasped them for a moment close against her heart, then very swiftly, as though she feared to be stopped, she took them over to the fireplace.

A fire was burning in the grate, for the night was chilly. She dropped the bundle into the flames, and stood there while it was consumed.

Caston saw the glare of the flames behind the paper light up here and there a word or a phrase, and then the edges curled over and the sparks ran across the sheets, and the letters changed to white ashes and black flakes. When all was done, she sighed and turned to Caston with a wistful smile of thanks. She moved back to the table, and with a queer orderliness which seemed somehow in keeping with her looks and manner, she replaced the beads, the little boxes, and the paraphernalia of her work carefully in the wells, and shut the table up. She turned again to Caston at the end. Just for a second she stood before him, her face not happy, but cleared of its trouble, and with a smile upon her lips. She stood, surely a living thing. Caston advanced to her. "You will stay now!" he cried, and she was gone.

This is the story as Harry Caston told it to Mrs. Wordingham when he returned to London in the autumn. She ridiculed it gently and with a trifle of anxiety, believing that solitude had bred delusions.

"Thank you," said Harry Caston grimly, and sitting up very erect. Mrs.

Wordingham changed her note.

"It's the most wonderful thing to have happened to you," she said. "I should have been frightened out of my life. And you weren't?"

Harry Gaston's face hardly relaxed.

"You don't believe a word of it," he a.s.serted sternly.

"Of course I do," she replied soothingly, "and I quite see that, with us nowhere near you, all your senses became refined, and you penetrated behind the curtain. Yes, I see all that, Harry. But she might, perhaps, have told you a little more, mightn't she? As a story, it almost sounds unfinished."

Harry Caston rose to his feet.

"I tell you what you are doing," he said, standing over her--"you are getting a little of your own back."

"But such a very little, Harry," murmured Mrs. Wordingham; and Harry Caston flung out of the room.

He did not refer to the subject again for some little while. But in the month of December, on one foggy afternoon, he arrived with a new book under his arm. He put it down on the floor beside his chair rather ostentatiously, as one inviting questions. Mrs. Wordingham was serenely unaware of the book.

"Where have you been, Harry?" she asked as she gave him a cup of tea.

"In Norfolk--shooting," he said.

"Many birds?"

"So few that we did not go out on the second day. We motored to a church instead--a very old church with a beautiful clerestory."

Mrs. Wordingham affected an intense interest.

"Old churches are wonderful," she said.

"You care no more about them than I do," said Harry Gaston brutally.

"I am not going to tell you about the church."

"Oh, aren't you?" said Mrs. Wordingham.

"No. What I am going to tell you is this. The vicar is a friend of my host, and happened to be in the church when we arrived. He showed us the building himself, and then, taking us into the vestry, got out the parish register. It dates back a good many years. Well, turning over the leaves, I noticed quite carelessly an entry made by the vicar in the year 1786. It was a note of a donation which he had made to the parish as a thanksgiving for his recovery from a severe operation which had been performed upon him in Norwich by a famous surgeon of the day named Twiddy."

"Yes?" said Mrs. Wordingham.

"That little entry occupied my mind much more than the church,"

continued Caston. "I wondered what the vicar must have felt as he travelled into Norwich in those days of no chloroform, no antiseptics, of sloughing wounds, and hospital fevers. Not much chance of _his_ ever coming back again, eh? And then the revulsion when he did recover--the return home to Frimley-next-the-Sea alive and well! It must all have been pretty wonderful to the vicar in 1786, eh?"