[Chapter I]
THE LOVERS
In a London quarter near the Thames, little frequented by day and almost deserted by night, there is a house with a small garden facing an extensive park from whose centre majestically rise groups of trees that have stood for a century or more, those trees of the old English soil which constant moisture nourishes and develops into colossal proportions. The memories attaching to this modest structure would be well worth exploitation by the historian, but Clio has chosen to avert her face from this, the scene of the most dismal historical drama whose narration was ever stifled into silence.
The tragedy which for a while was bounded by the walls of that pygmy house will forever remain in shadow, for such has been the decree of Destiny,—rather, such has been the will of certain powerful men in high places.
On the evening when this narrative opens, the prolonged spring twilight had lost every trace of the sunset afterglow when an aristocratic, stalwart young man enveloped in a gray cloak which did not conceal the symmetry of his form, approached the grating at the rear of the house and knocked on the iron bars with his cane four times at regular intervals. A moment later a white skirt gleamed amid the shrubbery and the face of its young possessor shone back of the grating. A dainty hand glided through the bars and the visitor clasped it ardently. Affectionate greetings followed and anxious questionings, too, for these plighted hearts could but claim Love's arrears after their long separation.
"Did you arrive today?"
"I have but just come, not even taking time to change my clothes. The letter which I sent preceded me but half an hour."
"Do they know you are here?"
"No. They think I am hunting on my Picmort estate."