"If Geoffrey had not been here the night before," she said, "the night when it took place, I don't know what would have happened to Harry. There would have been a raving lunatic, I think. As it was, he just howled and wept, so he told me, and Geoff sat by him and said: 'Cheer up, old chap!' and 'Damn it all, Harry!—yes, I don't care,' and gave him a whisky and soda, and slapped him on the back, and did all the things that men do. They didn't kiss each other and scream, and say that nobody loved them, as we should have done. And as like as not they played a game of billiards afterward, and felt immensely better. I suppose David and Jonathan were like that. Oh, I want Harry always to have a lot of men friends," she cried. "How I should hate it if he only went dangling along after his wife! But he loves me best of all. So don't deny it."
"Oh, I don't anticipate his eloping with the doctor," said Lady Oxted.
Outside the evening was fast falling. It was now a little after sunset, and, as a year ago, a young moon, silver and slim, was climbing the sky, where still lingered the reflected fire from the west in ribbons and feathers of rosy cloud. But to-night no mist, low hanging and opaque, fit cover for crouching danger, hung over lake and lawn; the air was crisp with autumnal frost, the hoarse tumult from the sluice subdued and low after a long St. Martin's summer. The four men—Jim, servantlike and respectful, little distance from the rest—had left the churchyard and strolled slowly in the direction of the stable and the house. Opposite the stable gate Jim would have turned in, but Harry detained him.
"No, Jim," he said, "come with us a little farther," and like man and man, not master and groom, he put his arm through that of the other. Then, by an instinctive movement, the doctor and Geoffrey closed up also, and thus linked they walked by the edge of the lake, and paused together at the sluice.
"And it was here," said Harry, "that one day the sluice broke, and down I went. Eh, a bad half hour!"
"Yes, my lord," sad Jim, grown suddenly bold, "and here it was that Mr. Geoffrey jumped in of a black night after a black villain."
"And somewhere here it is," said Geoffrey, "that the Luck lies. How low the lake is! I have never seen it so low."
They had approached to the very margin of the water, where little ripples, children of the breeze at sunset, broke and laughed on the steep sides of ooze discovered by the drought. Their sharp edges were caught by the fires overhead, and turned to scrolls of liquid flame.
"And that was the end of the Luck," said the doctor.
"The Luck!" cried Harry. "It was the curse that drove us all mad. I would sooner keep a cobra in the house than that thing. Madness and crime and death were its gifts. Ah, if I had guessed—if I had only guessed!"