That spring I did what a great many young fellows were doing in those particular days. I threw up my work at short notice, and went very far afield from Witching Hill. It was a long year before I came back, unscathed as to my skin, but with its contents ignobly² depreciated³ and reduced, on a visit to 7, Mulcaster Park.
 
Uvo Delavoye met me at the station, and we fled before the leisurely⁴ tide of top-hats and evening papers, while one of the porters followed with my things. There were no changes that I could see, except in myself as I caught sight of myself in my old office window. The creepers might have made a modest stride on the Queen Anne houses; brick and tile were perhaps a mellower⁵ red; and more tenants⁶ appeared to be growing better roses in their front gardens. But the place had always been at its best at the end of May: here was a giant's nosegay of apple-blossom, and there a glimpse of a horse-chestnut laden⁷ like a Christmas-tree with its cockades of pure cream. One felt the flight of time only at such homely⁸ spectacles as Shoolbred's van, delivering groceries at the house which Edgar Nettleton had tried to burn down with me in it. And an empty perambulator, over the way at Berylstow, confirmed the feeling when Delavoye informed me that the little caller was a remarkable⁹ blend of our old friend Guy Berridge and the whilom Miss Hemming¹⁰.
 
Mulcaster Park had moved bodily with the times. It had its asphalt paths at last. Incidentally I missed some blinds which had been taken over as tenant's fixtures¹¹ in my first or second year. The new ones were not red. The next house lower down had also changed hands; a very striking woman, in a garden hat, was filling a basket with roses from a William Allen Richardson which had turned the painted porch into a bower¹²; and instead of answering a simple question, Uvo stopped and called her to the gate.
 
"Let me introduce you to Mrs. Ricardo, Gilly," said he, as the lady joined us with a smile that set me thinking. "Mrs. Ricardo knows all about you, and was looking forward to seeing the conquering hero come marching home."
 
It was not one of Uvo's happiest speeches; but Mrs. Ricardo was neither embarrassed nor embarrassing in what she found to say to me. I liked her then and there: in any case I should have admired her. She was a tall and handsome brunette, with thick eyebrows¹⁴ and that high yet dusky colouring which reminds one in itself of stormlight and angry skies. But Mrs. Ricardo seemed the most good-natured of women, anxious at once not to bore me about my experiences, and yet to let us both see that she thoroughly¹⁵ appreciated their character.
 
"You will always be thankful that you went, Mr. Gillon, in spite of enteric," said Mrs. Ricardo. "The people to pity were those who couldn't go, but especially the old soldiers, who would have given anything to have gone."
 
I had just flattered myself that she was about to give each of us a rose; she had certainly selected an obvious buttonhole, and appeared to be seeking its fellow in the basket, when suddenly I saw her looking past us both and up the road. A middle-aged¹⁶ man was hobbling towards us in the thinning stream of homing citizens. He did not look one of them; he wore light clothes and a straw hat which he did not remove in accosting¹⁷ my companions; and I thought that he looked both hot and cross as he leant hard upon a serviceable stick.
 
"Gossiping at the gate, as usual!" he cried, with a kind of rasping raillery. "Even Mr. Delavoye won't thank you for keeping him standing¹⁸ on this villainous asphalt till his feet sink in."
 
"That would have been one for you, Gilly, in the old days," said Uvo. "Captain Ricardo—Mr. Gillon."
 
Captain Ricardo also seemed to have heard of me. He overhauled²¹ me with his peevish²² little eyes, and then said two or three of the bitterest things about the British forces, regular and irregular, that it ever was my lot to hear. I made no attempt to reply to them. His wife tried to present him with the rose which I fancied had been meant for one of us, and his prompt rejection²³ of the offering only hardened me in that impression. Then Uvo asked him if he had seen good play at the Oval; and so the vitriolic²⁴ stream was diverted into such congenial channels as the decadence²⁵ of modern cricket and the calibre of the other members of the Surrey Club.
 
"But won't you come in?" concluded the captain in his most forbidding manner. "I hate this talking at the gate like a pack of servants, but my wife seems to have a mania²⁶ for it."
 
It is only fair to state that Mrs. Ricardo had withdrawn²⁷ during the denunciation of the game which her husband spent his useless days in watching, as Uvo told me when we had declined his inhospitality and were out of earshot. It was all he did say about Captain Ricardo, and I said nothing at all. The people were evidently friends of his; at least the wife was, and it was she who had set me thinking with her first smile. I was still busy wondering whether, or where, I could have seen her before.
 
"It's quite possible," said Uvo, when I had wondered aloud. "I wouldn't give her away if it weren't an open secret here. But Witching Hill hasn't called on Mrs. Ricardo since it found out that she was once on the stage."
 
"Good Lord!"
 
"There's another reason, to give the neighbours their due. Ricardo has insulted most of them to their faces. A bit of gossip got about, and instead of ignoring it he limped out on the war-path, cutting half the Estate and damning the other half in heaps."
 
"But what was her stage name?"
 
Delavoye gave a grim laugh as he ushered²⁹ me into the garden of many memories. "You wouldn't know it, Gilly. You were never a great playgoer, you see, and Mrs. Ricardo was anything but a great actress. But she's a very great good sort, as you'll find out for yourself when you know her better."
 
I could quite believe it even then—but I was not so sure after a day or two with Uvo. I found him leading a lonely life, with Nettleton's old Sarah to look after him. Miss Delavoye had been wooed and married while my back was turned, and Mrs. Delavoye was on a long visit to the young couple. Uvo, however, appeared to be enjoying his solitude³⁰ rather than otherwise; his health was better, he was plying³¹ his pen, things were being taken by all kinds of periodicals. And yet I was uneasy about him. Among many little changes, but more in this house than in most, the subtlest change of all was in Uvo Delavoye himself.
 
He could not do enough for me; from the few survivors³² of his father's best bins³³, to my breakfast served in bed by his own hands, nothing was good enough for the fraud he made me feel. Yet we were not in touch as we had been of old. I could have done with fewer deeds of unnecessary kindness and more words of unguarded intimacy³⁴. He did not trust me as he used. He had something or somebody on his mind; and I soon made up mine that it was Mrs. Ricardo, but not from anything else he told me. He never mentioned her name again. He did not tell me that, with a view to a third road, the Estate had just purchased a fresh slice of the delightful³⁵ woodland behind Mulcaster Park; that in its depths was a little old ruin, just after his heart, and that this ruin was also a favourite haunt of Mrs. Ricardo's. I was left to make all these discoveries for myself, on a morning when Uvo Delavoye was expressly closeted at his desk.
 
It was, to be sure, my old Mr. Muskett who told me about the new land, and invited me to explore it at my pleasure. On a warm morning it seemed a better scheme than going alone upon the river, as Uvo had suggested. I accordingly turned back with Mr. Muskett, who went on to speak of the ruin, and in fact set me on my way to it while I was setting him to the station. Ten minutes later, in a tangle³⁶ of bush and bracken, I had found it: an ancient wall, scaled with patches of mouldy stucco, and at one end an Ionic pillar towering out of the sea of greenery like a lighthouse clear of the cliffs. Obviously, as Mr. Muskett had said, the fragments that remained of one of those toy temples which were a characteristic conceit³⁷ of old Georgian grounds. But it happened to be the first that I had seen, and I proceeded to reconnoitre the position with some interest. Then it was that Mrs. Ricardo was discovered, seated on one of several stumps³⁸ of similar pillars, on the far side of the wall.
 
Mrs. Ricardo, without her hat in the shadow of the old grey wall, but with her glossy⁴⁰ hair and glowing colour stamped against it with rich effect: a charming picture in its greenwood frame, especially as she was looking up to greet me with a radiant smile. But I was too taken aback to be appreciative⁴¹ for the moment. And then I decided⁴² that the high colouring was a thought too high, and a sudden self-consciousness disappointing after her excellent composure in the much more trying circumstances of our previous meeting.
 
"Haven't you been here before, Mr. Gillon?" Mrs. Ricardo seemed surprised, but quite competent to play the guide. "This mossy heap's supposed to have been the roof, and these stone stumps the columns that held it up. There's just that one standing as it was. There should be a 'sylvan⁴³ prospect⁴⁴' from where I'm sitting; but it must have been choked up for years and years."
 
"You do know a lot about it!" I cried, recovering my admiration⁴⁵ for the pretty woman as she recovered her self-possession. And then she smiled again, but not quite as I had caught her smiling.
 
"What Mr. Delavoye's friends don't know about Witching Hill oughtn't to be worth knowing!" said Mrs. Ricardo. "I mean what he really knows, not what he makes up, Mr. Gillon. I hear you don't believe in all that any more than I do. But he does seem to have read everything that was ever written about the place. He says this was certainly the Temple of Bacchus in the good old days."
 
"I don't quite see where Bacchus comes in," said I, thinking that Uvo and Mrs. Ricardo must be friends indeed.
 
"He's supposed to have been on this old wall behind us, in a fresco⁴⁶ or something, by Villikins or somebody. You can see where it's been gouged⁴⁷ out, and the stucco with it."
 
But I had to say what was in my mind. "Is Uvo Delavoye still harping⁴⁸ on about his bold bad ancestor, Mrs. Ricardo? Does he still call him his old man of the soil?"
 
To her, at any rate, yes, he did! She did not think it was a thing he talked about to everybody. But I had hoped it was an extinct folly⁴⁹, since he had not mentioned it as yet to me. It was almost as though Mrs. Ricardo had taken my old place. Did she discourage him as I had done? She told me it was his latest ambition to lay the ghost. And I marvelled⁵⁰ at their intimacy, and wondered what that curmudgeon⁵¹ of a husband had to say to it!
 
Yet it seemed natural enough that we should talk about Uvo Delavoye, as I sat on another of the broken columns and lit a cigarette at Mrs. Ricardo's suggestion. Uvo was one of those people who are the first of bonds between their friends, a fruitful subject, a most human interest in common. So I found myself speaking of him in my turn, with all affection and yet some little freedom, to an almost complete stranger who was drawing me on more deliberately⁵² than I saw.
 
"You were great friends, Mr. Gillon, weren't you?"
 
"We are, and I hope we always shall be."
 
"It must have been everything for you to have such a friend in such a place!"
 
"It was so! I stayed on and on because of him. He was the life and soul of the Estate to me."
 
Mrs. Ricardo looked as though she could have taken the words out of my mouth. "But what a spoilt life, and what a strange soul!" said she, instead; and I saw there was something in Mrs. Ricardo, after all.
 
She was looking at me and yet through me, as we sat on our broken bits of Ionic columns. She had spoken in a dreamy voice, with a wonderful softening⁵⁴ of her bold, flamboyant⁵⁵ beauty; for I was not looking through her by any means, but staring harder than I had any business, in a fresh endeavour to remember where we had met before. And for once she had spoken without a certain intonation⁵⁶, which I had hardly noticed in her speech until I missed it now.
 
"Of course I've heard of all the extraordinary adventures you've both had here," resumed Uvo's new friend, as though to emphasise⁵⁷ the terms that they were on.
 
"Not all of them?" I suggested. There were one or two affairs that he and I were to have kept to ourselves.
 
"Why not?" she flashed, suspiciously.
 
"Oh! I don't know."
 
"Which of them is such a secret?"
 
She was smiling now, but with obvious effort. Why this pressure on a pointless point? And where had I seen her before?
 
"Well, there was our very first adventure, for one," said I.
 
"Underground, you mean?"
 
"Yes—partly."
 
I could not help staring now. Mrs. Ricardo had reddened so inexplicably⁵⁹.
 
"There was no need to tell me the other part!" she said, scornfully. "I was in it—as you know very well!"
 
Then I did know. She was the bedizened beauty who had raked in the five-pound notes, and smashed a magnum of champagne⁶⁰ in her excitement, at the orgy in Sir Christopher Stainsby's billiard room.
 
"I know it now," I stammered⁶¹, "but I give you my word——"
 
"Fiddle⁶³!" she interrupted. "You've known it all the time. I've seen it in your face. He gave me away to you, and I shan't forgive him!"
 
I found myself involved in a heated exposition of the facts. I had never recognised her until that very minute. But I had kept wondering where we had met before. And that was all that she could have seen in my face. As for Uvo Delavoye, when I had spoken to him about it, he had merely assured me that I must have seen her on the stage: so far and no further had he given her away. Mrs. Ricardo took some assuring and reassuring⁶⁴ on the point. But the truth was in me, and in her ultimate pacification⁶⁵ she seemed to lose sight of the fact that she herself had done what she accused Uvo of doing. Evidently the leakage⁶⁶ of her secret mattered far less to Mrs. Ricardo than the horrible thought that Mr. Delavoye had let it out.
 
Of course I spoke⁵³ as though there was nothing to matter in the least to anybody, and asked after Sir Christopher as if the entertainment in his billiard room had been one of the most conventional. It seemed that he had married again in his old age; he had married one of the other ladies of those very revels⁶⁷.
 
"That's really why I first thought of coming here to live," explained Mrs. Ricardo, with her fine candour. "But there have been all kinds of disagreeables."
 
She had known about the tunnel before she had heard of it from Uvo; some member of the lively household had discovered its existence, and there had been high jinks down there on more than one occasion. But Lady Stainsby had not been the same person since her marriage. I gathered that she had put her reformed foot down on the underground orgies, but that Captain Ricardo had done his part in the subsequent disagreeables. It further appeared that the blood-stained lace and the diamond buckle⁶⁸ had also been discovered, and that old Sir Christopher had "behaved just like he would, and froze on to both without a word to Mr. Delavoye's grand relations."
 
I suggested that mining rights might have gone with the freehold, but Mrs. Ricardo quoted Uvo's opinion as to what still ailed⁶⁹ Sir Christopher Stainsby. She made it quite clear to me that our friend, at any rate, still laboured under his old obsession⁷⁰, and that she herself took it more seriously than she had professed⁷¹ before one confidence led to another.
 
"But don't you tell him I told you!" she added as though we were ourselves old friends. "The less you tell Mr. Delavoye of all we've been talking about, the better turn you'll be doing me, Mr. Gillon. It was just like him not to give away ancient history even to you, and I don't think you're the one to tell him how I went and did it myself!"
 
I could have wished that she had taken that for granted; but at least she felt too finely to bind⁷² me down to silence. Altogether I found her a fine creature, certainly in face and form, and almost certainly at heart, if one guessed even charitably at her past, and then at her life in a hostile suburb with a neglectful churl⁷³ of a husband.
 
But to admire the woman for her own sake was not to approve of her on all other grounds; and during our friendly and almost fascinating chat I contracted a fairly definite fear that was not removed by the manner of its conclusion. Mrs. Ricardo had looked at a watch pinned to a pretty but audacious blouse, and had risen rather hurriedly. But she had looked at her watch just a minute too late; as we turned the corner of the ruin, there was Delavoye hurrying through the brake towards us; and though he was far enough off to conceal⁷⁴ such confusion as Mrs. Ricardo had shown at my appearance on the scene, and to come up saying that he had found me at last, I could not but remember how he had shut himself up for the morning, after advising me to go on the river.
 
I was uneasy about them both; but it was impossible to say a word to anybody. He never spoke of her; that was another bad sign to my suspicious mind. It was entirely⁷⁵ from her that I had drawn²⁸ my material for sus............