"Over to the water."
"She had her dog with her, I hope."
"The dog followed her," said Mrs. Adair.
"I am glad," said Durrance. He knew quite well what comfort the dog would be to Ethne in this bad hour, and perhaps he rather envied the dog. Mrs. Adair wondered that at a moment of such distress to him he could still spare a thought for so small an alleviation of Ethne's trouble. She watched him cross the garden to the stile in the hedge. He walked steadily forward upon the path like a man who sees. There was nothing in his gait or bearing to reveal that the one thing left to him had that evening been taken away.
CHAPTER XX
WEST AND EAST
Durrance found his body-servant waiting up for him when he had come across the fields to his own house of "Guessens."
"You can turn the lights out and go to bed," said Durrance, and he walked through the hall into his study. The name hardly described the room, for it had always been more of a gun-room than a study.
He sat for some while in his chair and then began to walk gently about the room in the dark. There were many cups and goblets scattered about the room, which Durrance had won in his past days. He knew them each one by their shape and position, and he drew a kind of comfort from the feel of them. He took them up one by one and touched them and fondled them, wondering whether, now that he was blind, they were kept as clean and bright as they used to be. This one, a thin-stemmed goblet, he had won in a regimental steeple-chase at Colchester; he could remember the day with its clouds and grey sky and the dull look of the ploughed fields between the hedges. That pewter, which stood upon his writing table and which had formed a convenient holder for his pens, when pens had been of use, he had acquired very long ago in his college "fours," when he was a freshman at Oxford. The hoof of a favourite horse mounted in silver made an ornament upon the mantelpiece. His trophies made the room a gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at last to his guns and rifles.