Scarlett opened the old piano as he passed. "Do you remember?" he said, glancing brightly, and with a smile curving his red lips, as he began, with one hand, to touch a familiar tune. But Barbara cried "Hush!" and the tinkling, jangling notes died suddenly into the stillness. "Suppose she were to hear!"
"I wonder where she is," he rejoined, with a glance round. "She must have come to say good-bye to her old home, too."
There was no sign of her as they crossed the hall (where Barbara's great clock had long ago run down) and went up the wide, white stairs. But it was curious how they felt her unseen presence, and how the knowledge that at any moment they might turn a corner and encounter that living woman, made the place more truly haunted than if it had held a legion of ghosts. They walked in silence, like a couple of half-frightened children, along the passages, and the remembrance that the old house was doomed was with them all the time. It was strange to lay their warm light hands on those strong walls, which had outlasted so many lives, so much hope, and so much hopelessness, and to think that they, in their fragile, happy existence might well remain when Mitchelhurst Place was forgotten. It seemed hardly more than a phantom house already.
"I almost think she must have gone," Barbara whispered, as they came down-stairs again.
"No," said Adrian, with an oblique glance which her eyes followed.
Kate Harding was standing by one of the windows in the entrance hall, a stately figure in heavy draperies of black. Hearing the steps of the intruders she turned slightly, and partially confronted them, and the light fell on her face, pale and proud, close-lipped, full of mute and dreary defiance. Only she herself knew the passionate eagerness with which, as a girl, she had renounced her old home—only she knew the strange power with which Mitchelhurst had drawn her back once more. Fate had been too strong for her, and she had returned to her own place, perhaps to the thought of the son who had belonged more to it than to her. Her presence there that day was a confession of defeat too bitter to be spoken, a last homage of farewell to the old house which she was not rich enough to save.
Her eyes, resting indifferently on the girl's face, widened in sudden recognition, and she looked from Barbara to Adrian. Her glance enveloped the young couple in its swift intensity, and then fell coldly to the pavement as she bent her head. Barbara blushed and drooped, Scarlett bowed, as they passed the motionless woman, drawn back a little against the wall, with the faded map of the great Mitchelhurst estate hanging just behind her.
Their fly was waiting at the door, and in less than a minute they were rolling quickly down the avenue. Adrian, stooping to tuck a rug about his wife's feet, only raised himself in time to catch a last glimpse of the white house front, and to cry, "Good-bye, Mitchelhurst!" Barbara echoed his good-bye. Mitchelhurst was only an episode in her life; she cared for the place, yet she was not sorry to escape from its shadows of loves and hates, too deep and dark for her, and its unconquerable melancholy. She left it, but a touch of its sadness would cling to her in after years, giving her the tenderness which comes from a sense—dim, perhaps, but all-pervading—of the underlying suffering of the world. She looked back and saw her happiness tossed lightly and miraculously from crest to crest of the black waves which might have engulfed it in a moment; and even as she leaned in the warm shelter of Adrian's arm, she was sorry for the lives that were wrecked, and broken, and forgotten.
"Look!" he said quickly, as the road wound along the hill-side, and a steep bank, crowned with leafless thorns and brown stunted oaks, rose on the right, "this is where I said good-bye to you, Barbara, and you never knew it!"
"Never!" she cried. "No, I thought you had gone away, and hadn't cared to say good-bye."