For an instant Paul Farrant’s countenance became illumined; he made a hasty step forward. Then he hesitated, and, in renewed dismay, put his hand to his forehead. In the middle of the snow-drift, with a condemned cellar and an ugly housekeeper, debarred from gambling, debarred from fighting, his brain paralysed by a crushing sense of failure and folly—to devise amusement for this fastidious, caustic nobleman, what a task!

He moved to the window, in reality more to hide his fresh mortification than to examine the prospect of the weather. It was to find that there was a lull in the snowfall, that the wind had rent a gap between the brooding clouds and revealed a patch of starry sky ridden by the sickle of a young moon. Through the swaying trees gleamed fitfully a distant red fire, and beyond it, further down the waste, a steadier yellow light came and went, as the wind bowed and released some plumy fir branch: the iron-smelting forge of the Hammer Pond! The inn at Liphook! Now, he remembered him, the smelter was a man of infinite popularity, the jester of the countryside; one who could sing a rousing stave to the clank of his hammer, and crack you the drollest stories over the home-brewed, were it only strong enough. Failing him, there was the innkeeper of the Anchor, at Liphook. Mine host had the secret of a noted posset that his Majesty himself, halting on the Portsmouth Road, had once generously praised. Nay, at the inn he might possibly pick up some belated traveller, whose conversation—he bitterly thought—would prove more acceptable than his own. At any rate, ’twas all the hope he had to cling to. Rockhurst never spared.

“If your lordship will give me congé for a short while,” he cried, turning back to the room, “I shall endeavour to meet your wishes.… We may not be so destitute of entertaining company at Farrant Chace as your lordship deems.”

He seized his cloak, flung it angrily about him, goaded by the sound of the faint laugh, and strode out. Rockhurst subsided into the chair, laughed a little yet, then sighed and fell a-brooding again.

II
THE LADY IN THE SNOW

The lull after the squall had left a waste world, dim yet white, beneath a cloud-strewn sky. High among the clouds the wind was still racing; and the aspect of the heavens was perpetually changing, as masses of vapour rose and scuttled before the blast like giant herds: rent apart, drawing closer, scattered again. Thus the land was a-flicker with shine and shadows, and yet lay dead under that semblance of life.

Paul Farrant, astride the old farm mare, had no thought to spare for the new appearance of the white wilderness; scarce even a feeling for the biting cold. His brain was all astir with vivid, angry images. His pulses throbbed with the excitement of the gambler playing for the highest stakes a man can win or lose.

“’Tis now your wit against your honour,” had said the Rakehell.

His honour! It had never been to Farrant the thing dearer than his own soul, which to lose, even to his own secret knowledge, were damnation. To know himself dishonoured meant to him merely disgrace if he could not save himself by his wit. Yet disgrace spelt the most unendurable fate that could overtake one in whose nature vanity played the chief part. And if he failed to fulfil the condition so contemptuously placed upon his worldly redemption, he knew his Rockhurst—all was over for Farrant the aspiring; for Farrant, who was already beginning to be envied; for Farrant, who had once sat at the King’s supper-table and had actually been honoured by a quip from his Majesty’s own lips!…