rustling in the ivy on the walls of the stables.

I fell into a train of thought. I think my mind must still have
been under Glossop's gloom-breeding spell, for I was filled with a
sense of the infinite pathos of Life. What was the good of it all?
Why was a man given chances of happiness without the sense to
realize and use them? If Nature had made me so self-satisfied that
I had lost Audrey because of my self-satisfaction why had she not
made me so self-satisfied that I could lose her without a pang?
Audrey! It annoyed me that, whenever I was free for a moment from
active work, my thoughts should keep turning to her. It frightened
me, too. Engaged to Cynthia, I had no right to have such thoughts.

Perhaps it was the mystery which hung about her that kept her in
my mind. I did not know where she was. I did not know how she
fared. I did not know what sort of a man it was whom she had
preferred to me. That, it struck me, was the crux of the matter.
She had vanished absolutely with another man whom I had never seen
and whose very name I did not know. I had been beaten by an unseen
foe.

I was deep in a very slough of despond when suddenly things began
to happen. I might have known that Sanstead House would never
permit solitary brooding on Life for long. It was a place of
incident, not of abstract speculation.

I had reached the end of my 'beat', and had stopped to relight my
pipe, when drama broke loose with the swift unexpectedness which
was characteristic of the place. The stillness of the night was
split by a sound which I could have heard in a gale and recognized