Night engulfed him, rushed past him, broke over him. He was like a ship thrusting forward into a trackless ocean.
The paleness of dawn was in the sky as he neared Gloucester. When he entered, its roofs and towers were precipices of gold and fire, straining up to the New Jerusalem which floated in the clouds. The streets of the ancient city had a mystic look, white and hushed and tenantless. But already the cheeky
sparrows were about, scandal-mongering beneath the eaves with an unholy disregard for the awe by which they were surrounded.
He left Gloucester in a southwesterly direction. In fields the hay was lying cut. A largesse of dew had been scattered through the hedgerows like loot from the treasure-chests of emperors. Larks were battling up, striving to sing against the very bars of heaven. Every fragrance and sound was a messenger, guaranteeing happiness.
Round a bend in the road he came across a cluster of thatched cottages, their white walls gleaming incandescent in the morning sunshine. Beyond them lay a parkland, from the edge of which rose a wooded knoll, crowned by a moated castle. The next mile-stone warned him that it was the village of Dawn he was approaching.
VI
All day he had waited—a lazy summer day, drowsy with the hum of bees and heavy with the perfume of cottage flowers. On entering the village he had put up at The Dawn Arms, an old-fashioned hunting hostel which owed its prosperity to the fame of the Dawn foxhounds. Having bathed and breakfasted, he had started off to leave his card on Lady Dawn. Arriving at the Castle, he had been informed that her Ladyship had left early that morning and was not expected back till early evening. He had filled in the morning by sleeping and the afternoon by joining a band of sight-seeing trippers who had
driven over from Gloucester in gayly-painted chars-a-bancs.
With a spice of amusement, he had paid his shilling for admission at the wooden booth outside the Castle gate and had found himself herded with a crowd of affectionately inclined young women and young men who perspired freely—the latter for the sake of greater comfort had removed their coats and knotted handkerchiefs about their throats. In good time a decrepit ex-butler had appeared to act as guide and had led the excursionists over the Norman part of the ruins. He had shown them the dungeons, the room in which a prince had been murdered and the havoc wrought upon the walls by Cromwellian cannon. The ever recurring theme of his trembling narrative was the prowess and the splendor of the Dawns. He was like a weak-voiced cricket chirping in the sunshine. His stories of bygone lords, who had died in rebellions and crusades, were too ancient to grip the imagination. At first his veneration for the race which he served inspired an outward show of respect on the part of his hearers. But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly sheep looked up somnolently to watch them.
To the few who remained the old man mumbled on. It was the nobility of the late Lord Dawn that he was now recounting—the daring horseman he