Sir Anthony Gyde passed across the hall, opened a door, and entered the library.
He paced up and down. To-morrow evening at this hour he was due to meet Spain in the person of her Ambassador, and to discuss a loan that had been entrusted to his hands.
But he was not thinking of Spain. For the moment the affairs of the world were nothing to him.
For the moment his mind was driven into communication with his soul.
As he walked up and down, now with his hands in his pockets, now with his arms crossed, his face wore that expression which a face wears when its owner finds himself fronting his fate.
The most terrible experience in life is to meet the past, and to find that it is still living.
What a helpless, vague, futile country seems the past; just a picture, a voice, a dream. Yet what demons live there, active and in being.
Men fear the future, but it is in the past that danger lies. At any moment one of those old vague pictures that lie beyond yesterday, may become animated, and the woman we betrayed in the rose garden, or the brother of the man we killed in the desert, may enter our lives through some unseen door.
Gyde, having paced the room for some ten minutes, rang a bell by the mantel and ordered the servant who answered it to summon Gristlethwaite, the land-agent.
He was a short, thick-set man, Cumbrian by birth, but with little trace of the accent.