"To be sure," replied Caston. "You may count them by dozens on bicycles if you stand for an hour or two above the road here." And he went back to the house. It was quite clear that his visitant of last night, if there had been one, was not the native spectre of this small old manor-house.
"The slim white hand I saw," Caston argued, "belonged to no old man in grey stockings or out of them. It was the hand of a quite young woman. But if she doesn't belong to the house, if she isn't one of the fixtures to be taken on by the incoming tenant--if, in a word, she's a trespasser--how in the world did she find her way here?"
Caston suddenly saw an answer to the question--a queer and a rather attractive answer, especially to a man who had fed for a month on solitude and had grown liable to fancies. He had all through this lonely month been gradually washing from his body and his mind the dust of his own times. He had sought to reproduce the quiet of an older age, and in the seeking had perhaps done more than reproduce. That was his thought. He had, perhaps, by ever so little, penetrated the dark veil which hides from men all days but their own--just enough, say, to catch a glimpse of a hand. He himself was becoming more and more harmonious with his house; the cries of the outer world hardly reached his ears in that little parlour which opened on to the hidden garden. It seemed to him that other times, through some thinning out of the thick curtain of his senses, were becoming actual and real just to him.
"The first month passed," he said to himself. "I was undisturbed; no sign was made. I was still too near to what I had left behind--London and the rest of it. But now I pass more and more over the threshold into that other century. First of all, I was only aware of a movement, a presence; then I was able to see--nothing much, it is true--only a small hand. But tonight I may see her to whom the hand belongs. In a week I may be admitted into her company."
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."