“But how do you know?” I asked.
“Because I’ve been in the house before, once only, three years ago,” he said. “Margaret Alton took it furnished and lived there for a year or so. She died there, and I was with her. And if I had known that this was your house, I should never have dreamed of hesitating whether I should accept your invitation. I should have thrown my good manners about not dying in other people’s houses to the winds. But the moment you began to describe the garden and garden-room I knew what house it was. I have always longed to go there again. When may I come, please? Next week is too far ahead. You’re off there this afternoon, aren’t you?”
I rose: the clock warned me that it was time for me to go to the station.
“Yes. Come this afternoon,” I suggested. “Come with me.”
“I wish I could, but I take that to mean that it will suit you if I come to-morrow. For I certainly will. Good Lord! To think of your having got just that house! It ought to be a wonderfully happy one, for I saw—— But I’ll tell you about that perhaps when I’m there. But don’t ask me to: I’ll tell you if and when I can, as the lawyers say. Are you really off?”
I was really off, for I had no time to spare, but before I got to the door he spoke again.
“Of course, the room I have chosen was the room,” he said, and there was no need for me to ask what he meant by the room.
I knew no more than the barest and most public outline of that affair, distant now by the space of many years, but, so I conceived, ever green in Roderick’s heart, and, as my train threaded its way through the gleams of this translucent spring evening, I retraced this outline as far as I knew it. It was the one thing of which Roderick never spoke (even now he was not sure that he could manage to tell me the end of it), and I had to rummage in my memory for the reconstruction of the half-obliterated lines.
Margaret—her maiden-name would not be conjured back into memory—had been an extremely beautiful girl when Roderick first met her, and, not without encouragement, he had fallen head over ears in love with her. All seemed to be going well with his wooing, he had the air of a happy lover, when there appeared on the scene that handsome and outrageous fellow, Richard Alton. He was the heir to his uncle’s barony and his really vast estates, and the girl, when he proceeded to lay siege, very soon capitulated. She may have fallen in love with him, for he was an attractive scamp, but the verdict at the time was that it was her ambition, not her heart, that she indulged. In any case, there was the end of Roderick’s wooing, and before the year was out she had married the other.