Fergusson's smile deepened.
"She has a warm advocate in you; you are not a friend of hers?"
"I never saw her before," Christina answered. "I am staying near Graystone. I am nurse to Lady Cicely Redesdale's little girl, and it was only by chance that we were passing the beautiful lady's house to-day."
"There comes the car," Fergusson said, as the crunching of wheels on gravel became audible; "now I will drive you as far as our ways go together, and you shall tell me where I am to go. I will not take my man, lest there should be any risk of my destination being discovered. And—I will take the required oath. Mind—I do it much against my will, but, if it is a matter of life and death, I—can't refuse it. Come—your beautiful lady's secrets will be absolutely safe with me."
As well as she was able, Christina gave a minute description of the lonely house in the valley, where she had received the strange message, and Fergusson, having deposited her safely within a very few hundred yards of Mrs. Nairne's farm, raced on across the moor and down the steep lane, which the little cart had traversed so short a time before.
"Never knew there was any house down here," he mused, as he drove further and further along the lane; "uncanny sort of place." The short December day was drawing to a close. No ray of the sunshine that still shone on the moorland above, penetrated into this valley, whose steep, thickly-wooded sides threw deep shadows across it. "What on earth possessed anybody to build a house in this gloomy hole, when all the uplands were there to be built upon?" So Fergusson's musings ran on, whilst the shadows thickened round him, the gloom of the place beginning to oppress him like a nightmare. The roughness and steepness of the road obliged him to proceed slowly and with great caution, and the fast-fading light made his progress a difficult one. It was a relief to him, therefore, when, through the semi-darkness, he became aware of a high stone wall on his right, and descried, above the wall, the dim outline of a chimney, from which smoke issued.
"This, presumably, is the place," he muttered, stopping the car before a door in the wall; "and now, how does one get into such a very prison-like abode?"
He had by this time alighted, and was standing in the lane, looking first at the closed green door, then at the frowning wall, and finally up the steep way by which he had come—a way which, in the fast-falling darkness, was beginning to resemble a long black tunnel.
Now that the sound of his car's machinery had ceased, the silence around him was very eerie, and Fergusson found that some words of the burial service were beating backwards and forwards in his brain—
"The grave and gate of death ... The grave and gate of death."