How would she greet him now? How would she look at him? What would be her first word? He thought that it would be his name. He hoped it might be; for in her utterance of it he would read all he sought to know.
They came to a clattering halt at the rectory door. He flung down from the saddle without waiting for his groom’s assistance, and creaked and clanked across the cobbles to rattle on the oak with the butt of his riding-whip.
The door swung inwards. Before him, startled of glance, stood a lean old crone who in nothing resembled the corpulent Mathilda who had kept the rector’s house of old. He stared at her, some of the glad eagerness perishing in his face.
“The ... the rector?” quoth he, faltering. “Is he at home?”
“Aye, he be in,” she mumbled, mistrustfully eyeing his imposing figure. “Do ee bide a moment, whiles I calls him.” She vanished into the gloom of the hall, whence her voice reached him, calling: “Master! Master! Here be stranger!”
A stranger! O God! Here all was not as it should be.
Came a quick, youthful step, and a moment later a young man advanced from the gloom. He was tall, comely, and golden-haired; he wore clerkly black and the Geneva bands of a cleric.
“You desired to see me, sir?” he inquired.
Randal Holles stood looking at him, speechless for a long moment, dumbfounded. He moistened his lips at last, and spoke.
“It was Mr. Sylvester whom I desired to see, sir,” he answered. “Tell me”—and in his eagerness he was so unmannerly as to clutch the unknown parson’s arm—“where is he? Is he no longer here?”