my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing
lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual
phantasmagoria of the day's events--faces, scenes, memories,--and in due
course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.

When we left the train, after six hours' travelling, at a little
wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather,
the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the
landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland
hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling
across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen
air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about
us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the
coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road
among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift
past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs
of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing
five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged
into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to
the moment of actual arrival.

Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army
officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the
process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as
a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning
grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements
showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years.
The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be
depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil