"Working so early?"
Vont nodded.
"You forget," he said, "that this is not early for me. All my life I have risen with the sun and gone to bed with it. Come inside, David. I'll get this muck off my hands. You spoke of the afternoon."
"I came direct from the village," David replied, as he followed his uncle into the house. "I came because I thought you would like to know that there is another visitor on the way to see you."
Richard Vont looked round and faced his nephew. His shirt was open at the throat, his trousers were tied up with little pieces of string. In whatever labour he had been engaged, it had obviously been of a strenuous character. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
"What's that, David?" he demanded. "A visitor?"
"Marcia is at the Mandeleys Arms," David told him. "I am taking it for granted that she is on her way to see you."
Vont turned deliberately away, and David heard his heavy feet ascending the staircase. In a few moments he called downstairs. His voice was as usual.
"Step round this afternoon, lad, if you think it's well."
David passed out of the little garden, crossed the strip of park, and, taking the wheel, drove slowly round by the longer route to Broomleys. He passed before the front of the Abbey—a mansion of the dead, with row after row of closed blinds, masses of smokeless chimneys, and patches of weeds growing thick in the great sweep before the house. Even with its air of pitiless desertion, its severe, semi-ecclesiastical outline, its ruined cloisters empty to the sky on one wing, its unbroken and gloomy silence, the place had its atmosphere. David slackened the speed of his car, paused for a moment and looked back at the little creeper-covered cottage on the other side of the moat. So those two had faced one another through the years—the Abbey, silent, magnificent, historical, with all the placid majesty of its countless rows of windows; its chapel, where Mandeleys for generations had been christened and buried,—at its gates the little cottage, whose garden was filled with spring flowers, and from whose single stack of chimneys the smoke curled upwards. Even while he watched, Richard Vont stood there upon the threshold with a great book under his arm.