"I expect he was back in the past, Jean. But perhaps he's more for the
folks than meat and drink, really."

But as she ran along the gusty passage to the green baize door all
her pride rose savagely to think that guests should come, bidden
autocratically to the house, and go away unfed. And that the servant,
the one poor staunch, unpaid servant, should grieve about it. But she
soon lost that thought as she knocked at the green baize door and could
get no answer.

"Father! Yell be cold in there. Do come out!"

She waited, and at last he answered her steadily and clearly.

"I'm coming at the right time, Marcella. I have my watch."

"But you'll be so cold," she protested.

"I'll be colder yet, soon," he said calmly, and she was forced to go
away. She guessed that Andrew's sense of dramatic fitness made him wish
to make his last entry on the stage alone. So she went back to her room
and stood looking out over Lashnagar, where the autumn mists stalked and
mowed at each other and fluttered and jostled and fought.

Before seven o'clock the book-room was full of people, soaked
through with the mist. They were the people Marcella had known all her
life--fisher-folk, farm labourers, crofters--and she felt a momentary
exultant pride to think that, at a word from her father, they had
thronged to his house. There seemed something fitting in their coming on