She looked down as she walked, drawing her delicate brows a little together.
"I dare say he does," she said softly, as if to herself.
Between ten and eleven that evening Mr. Reynold Harding sat by his fireside, staring at the red coals as they faded drearily into ashes. Being duly washed and brushed, he showed but slight traces of his accident. The scratches on his face were not deep, and his torn hand was mended with little strips of black plaster. Intently as he seemed to think, his thoughts were not definite. Had he been questioned concerning them he could have answered only "Mitchelhurst." Anger, tenderness, curiosity, pride, and bitter self-contempt were mixed in silent strife in the shadows of his soul. The memory of the Rothwells had drawn him on his pilgrimage—a vain, hopeless, barren memory, and yet the best he had. He had intended to wander about the village, to look from a distance at the Rothwells' house, to stand by the Rothwells' graves in the churchyard, and to laugh at his own folly as he did so. And now he was to sleep under their roof, to know the very rooms where they had lived and died, and for this he was to thank these strangers who played at hospitality in the old home. He thought of the morrow with curious alternations of distaste and eagerness.
Mr Hayes, meanwhile, with the lamplight shining on his white hair, was studying a paper in the Transactions of the County Archæological Society, "On an Inscription in Mitchelhurst Church." Mr Hayes had a theory of his own on the subject, and smiled over the vicar's view with the tranquil enjoyment of unalloyed contempt.
And Barbara, in the silence of her room, opposite a dimly-lighted mirror, sat brushing her shadowy hair, whose waves seemed to melt into the dusk about the pale reflection of her face. As she gazed at it she was thinking of some one who was gone, and of some one who was to come. Dwelling among the old memories of Mitchelhurst Place, her girlish thoughts had turned to them for lack of other food, till the Rothwells were real to her in a sense in which no other fancies ever could be real. She was so conscious that her connection with the house was accidental and temporary, that she felt as if it still belonged to its old owners, and she was only their guest. They were always near, yet, whimsically enough, in point of time they were nearest when they were most remote. Barbara's phantoms mostly belonged to the last century, and they faded and grew pale as they approached the present day, till the latest owner of the Place was merely a name. The truth was that at the end of their reign the Rothwells, impoverished and lonely, had simply lived in the house as they found it, and were unable to set the stamp of any individual tastes upon their surroundings. They were the Rothwells of the good old times who left their autographs in the books in the library, their patient needlework on quilts and bell-pulls, their mouldering rose-leaves in great china jars, their pictures still hanging on the walls, and traces of their preferences in the names of rooms and paths. There were inscriptions under the bells that had summoned servants long ago, which told of busy times and a full house. The lettering only differed from anything in the present day by being subtly and unobtrusively old-fashioned. "Mr. Gerald" and "Mr. Thomas" had given up ringing bells for many a long day, and if the one suspended above Miss Sarah's name sometimes tinkled through the stillness, it was only because Barbara wanted some hot water. Miss Sarah was one of the most distinct of the girl's phantoms. Rightly or wrongly, Barbara always believed her to be the beautiful Miss Rothwell of whom an old man in the village told her a tradition, told to him in his boyhood. It seemed that a Rothwell of some uncertain date stood for the county ("and pretty nigh ruined himself," said her informant, with a grim, yet admiring, enjoyment of the extravagant folly of the contest), and in the very heat of the election Miss Rothwell drove with four horses to the polling-place, to show herself clothed from head to foot in a startling splendour of yellow, her father's colour.
"They said she was a rare sight to see," the old man concluded meditatively.
"And did Mr. Rothwell get in?" asked Barbara.
"No, no!" he said, shaking his head. "No Rothwell ever got in for the county, though they tried times. But he pretty nigh ruined himself."
Had she cared to ask her uncle, Barbara might very possibly have ascertained the precise date of the election, and identified the darkly beautiful girl who was whirled by her four spirited horses into the roaring, decorated town. But she was not inclined to talk of her fancies to Mr. Hayes. So, assuming the heroine to be Miss Sarah, she remained in utter ignorance concerning her after life. Did she ever wear the white robes of a bride, or the blackness of widow's weeds? Barbara often wondered. But at night, in her room, which was Sarah Rothwell's, she could never picture her otherwise than superbly defiant in the meteor-like glory of that one day.