Randolph’s request for a four months’ leave of absence was granted with little objection and no curiosity. He had acquired the confidence of his employers, and beyond Mr. Revelstoke’s curt surprise that a young fellow on the road to fortune should sacrifice so much time to irrelevant travel, and the remark, “But you know your own business best,” there was no comment. It struck the young man, however, that Mr. Dingwall’s slight coolness on receiving the news might be attributed to a suspicion that he was following Miss Avondale, whom he had fancied Dingwall disliked, and he quickly made certain inquiries in regard to Miss Eversleigh and the possibility of his meeting her. As, without intending it, and to his own surprise, he achieved a blush in so doing, which Dingwall noted, he received a gracious reply, and the suggestion that it was “quite proper” for him, on arriving, to send the young lady his card.

Captain Dornton, under the alias of “Captain Johns,” was ready to catch the next steamer to the Isthmus, and in two days they sailed. The voyage was uneventful, and if Randolph had expected any enthusiasm on the part of the captain in the mission on which he was now fairly launched, he would have been disappointed. Although his frankness was unchanged, he volunteered no confidences. It was evident he was fully acquainted with the legal strength of his claim, yet he, as evidently, deferred making any plan of redress until he reached England. Of Miss Eversleigh he was more communicative. “You would have liked her better, my lad, it you hadn’t been bewitched by the Avondale woman, for she is the whitest of the Dorntons.” In vain Randolph protested truthfully, yet with an even more convincing color, that it had made no difference, and he HAD liked her. The captain laughed. “Ay, lad! But she’s a poor orphan, with scarcely a hundred pounds a year, who lives with her guardian, an old clergyman. And yet,” he added grimly, “there are only three lives between her and the property—mine, Bobby’s, and Bill’s—unless HE should marry and have an heir.”

“The more reason why you should assert yourself and do what you can for her now,” said Randolph eagerly.

“Ay,” returned the captain, with his usual laugh, “when she was a child I used to call her my little sweetheart, and gave her a ring, and I reckon I promised to marry her, too, when she grew up.”

The truthful Randolph would have told him of Miss Evereleigh’s gift, but unfortunately he felt himself again blushing, and fearful lest the captain would misconstrue his confusion, he said nothing.

Except on this occasion, the captain talked with Randolph chiefly of his later past,—of voyages he had made, of places they were passing, and ports they visited. He spent much of the time with the officers, and even the crew, over whom he seemed to exercise a singular power, and with whom he exhibited an odd freemasonry. To Randolph’s eyes he appeared to grow in strength and stature in the salt breath of the sea, and although he was uniformly kind, even affectionate, to him, he was brusque to the other passengers, and at times even with his friends the sailors. Randolph sometimes wondered how he would treat a crew of his own. He found some answer to that question in the captain’s manner to Jack Redhill, the abstractor of the portmanteau, and his old shipmate, who was accompanying the captain in some dependent capacity, but who received his master’s confidences and orders with respectful devotion.

It was a cold, foggy morning, nearly two months later, that they landed at Plymouth. The English coast had been a vague blank all night, only pierced, long hours apart, by dim star-points or weird yellow beacon flashes against the horizon. And this vagueness and unreality increased on landing, until it seemed to Randolph that they had slipped into a land of dreams. The illusion was kept up as they walked in the weird shadows through half-lit streets into a murky railway station throbbing with steam and sudden angry flashes in the darkness, and then drew away into what ought to have been the open country, but was only gray plains of mist against a lost horizon. Sometimes even the vague outlook was obliterated by passing trains coming from nowhere and slipping into nothingness. As they crept along with the day, without, however, any lightening of the opaque vault overhead to mark its meridian, there came at times a thinning of the gray wall on either side of the track, showing the vague bulk of a distant hill, the battlemented sky line of an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back into the mist again as in a dream. Then vague stretches of gloom again, foggy stations obscured by nebulous light and blurred and moving figures, and the black relief of a tunnel. Only once the captain, catching sight of Randolph’s awed face under the lamp of the smoking carriage, gave way to his long, low laugh. “Jolly place, England—so very ‘Merrie.’” And then they came to a comparatively lighter, broader, and more brilliantly signaled tunnel filled with people, and as they remained in it, Randolph was told it was London. With the sensation of being only half awake, he was guided and put into a cab by his companion, and seemed to be completely roused only at the hotel.

It had been arranged that Randolph should first go down to Chillingworth rectory and call on Miss Eversleigh, and, without disclosing his secret, gather the latest news from Dornton Hall, only a few miles from Chillingworth. For this purpose he had telegraphed to her that evening, and had received a cordial response. The next morning he arose early, and, in spite of the gloom, in the glow of his youthful optimism entered the bedroom of the sleeping Captain Dornton, and shook him by the shoulder in lieu of the accolade, saying: “Rise, Sir John Dornton!”

The captain, a light sleeper, awoke quickly. “Thank you, my lad, all the same, though I don’t know that I’m quite ready yet to tumble up to that kind of piping. There’s a rotten old saying in the family that only once in a hundred years the eldest son succeeds. That’s why Bill was so cocksure, I reckon. Well?”

“In an hour I’m off to Chillingworth to begin the campaign,” said Randolph cheerily.

“Luck to you, my boy, whatever happens. Clap a stopper on your jaws, though, now and then. I’m glad you like Sybby, but I don’t want you to like her so much as to forget yourself and give me away.”

Half an hour out of London the fog grew thinner, breaking into lace-like shreds in the woods as the train sped by, or expanding into lustrous tenuity above him. Although the trees were leafless, there was some recompense in the glimpses their bare boughs afforded of clustering chimneys and gables nestling in ivy. An infinite repose had been laid upon the landscape with the withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted from the face of a sleeper. All his boyish dreams of the mother country came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast silence. Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages. Quaint old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of church or hall, the trim, ordered parks, tiny streams crossed by heavy stone bridges much too large for them—all these were only pages of those books whose leaves he seemed to be turning over. Two hours of this fancy, and then the train stopped at a station within a mile or two of a bleak headland, a beacon, and the gray wash of a pewter-colored sea, where a hilly village street climbed to a Norman church tower and the ivied gables of a rectory.

Miss Eversleigh, dignifiedly tall, but youthfully frank, as he remembered her, was waiting to drive him in a pony trap to the rectory. A little pink, with suppressed consciousness and the responsibilities of presenting a stranger guest to her guardian, she seemed to Randolph more charming than ever.

But her first word of news shocked and held him breathless. Bobby, the little orphan, a frail exotic, had succumbed to the Northern winter. A cold caught in New York had developed into pneumonia, and he died on the passage. Miss Avondale, although she had received marked attention from Sir William, returned to America in the same ship.

“I really don’t think she was quite as devoted to the poor child as all that, you know,” she continued with innocent frankness, “and Cousin Bill was certainly most kind to them both, yet there really seemed to be some coolness between them after the child’s death. But,” she added suddenly, for the first time observing her companion’s evident distress, and coloring in confusion, “I beg your pardon—I’ve been horribly rude and heartless. I dare say the poor boy was very dear to you, and of course Miss Avondale was your friend. Please forgive me!”

Randolph, intent only on that catastrophe which seemed to wreck all Captain Dornton’s hopes and blunt his only purpose for declaring himself, hurriedly reassured her, yet was not sorry his agitation had been misunderstood. And what was to be done? There was no train back to London for four hours. He dare not telegraph, and if he did, could he trust to his strange patron’s wise conduct under the first shock of this news to his present vacillating purpose? He could only wait.

Luckily for his ungallant abstraction, they were speedily at the rectory, where a warm welcome from Mr. Brunton, Sibyl’s guardian, and his family forced him to recover himself, and showed him that the story of his devotion to John Dornton had suffered nothing from Miss Eversleigh’s recital. Distraught and anxious as he was, he could not resist the young girl’s offer after luncheon to show him the church with the vault of the Dorntons and the tablet erected to John Dornton, and, later, the Hall, only two miles distant. But here Randolph hesitated.

“I would rather not call on Sir William to-day,” he said.

“You need not. He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won’t be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won’t be very pleasant company.”

“Sibyl!” said the rector in good-humored protest.

“Oh, Mr. Trent has had a little of Cousin Bill’s convivial manners before now,” said the young girl vivaciously, “and isn’t shocked. But we can see the Hall from the park on our way to the station.”

Even in his anxious preoccupation he could see that the church itself was a quaint and wonderful preservation of the past. For four centuries it had been sacred to the tombs of the Dorntons and their effigies in brass and marble, yet, as Randolph glanced at the stately sarcophagus of the unknown ticket of leave man, its complacent absurdity, combined with his nervousness, made him almost hysterical. Yet again, it seemed to him that something of the mystery and inviolability of the past now invested that degraded dust, and it would be an equal impiety to disturb it. Miss Eversleigh, again believing his agitation caused by the memory of his old patron, tactfully hurried him away. Yet it was a more bitter thought, I fear, that not only were his lips sealed to his charming companion on the subject in which they could sympathize, but his anxiety prevented him from availing himself of that interview to exchange the lighter confidences he had eagerly looked forward to. It seemed cruel that he was debarred this chance of knitting their friendship closer by another of those accidents that had brought them together. And he was aware that his gloomy abstraction was noticed by her. At first she drew herself up in a certain proud reserve, and then, perhaps, his own nervousness infecting her in turn, he was at last terrified to observe that, as she stood before the tomb, her clear gray eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, please don’t do that—THERE, Miss Eversleigh,” he burst out impulsively.

“I was thinking of Cousin Jack,” she said, a little startled at his abruptness. “Sometimes it seems so strange that he is dead—I scarcely can believe it.”

“I meant,” stammered Randolph, “that he is much happier—you know”—he grew almost hysterical again as he thought of the captain lying cheerfully in his bed at the hotel—“much happier than you or I,” he added bitterly; “that is—I mean, it grieves me so to see YOU grieve, you know.”

Miss Eversleigh did NOT know, but there was enough sincerity and real feeling in the young fellow’s voice and eyes to make her color slightly and hurry him away to a locality less fraught with emotions. In a few moments they entered the park, and the old Hall rose before them. It was a great Tudor house of mullioned windows, traceries, and battlements; of stately towers, moss-grown balustrades, and statues darkening with the fog that was already hiding the angles and wings of its huge bulk. A peacock spread its ostentatious tail on the broad stone steps before the portal; a flight of rooks from the leafless elms rose above its stacked and twisted chimneys. After all, how little had this stately incarnation of the vested rights and sacred tenures of the past in common with the laughing rover he had left in London that morning! And thinking of the destinies that the captain held so lightly in his hand, and perhaps not a little of the absurdity of his own position to the confiding young girl beside him, for a moment he half hated him.

The fog deepened as they reached the station, and, as it seemed to Randolph, made their parting still more vague and indefinite, and it was with difficulty that he could respond to the young girl’s frank hope that he would soon return to them. Yet he half resolved that he would not until he could tell her all.

Nevertheless, as the train crept more and more slowly, with halting signals, toward London, he buoyed himself up with the hope that Captain Dornton would still try conclusions for his patrimony, or at least come to some compromise by which he might be restored to his rank and name. But upon these hopes the vision of that great house settled firmly upon its lands, held there in perpetuity by the dead and stretched-out hands of those that lay beneath its soil, always obtruded itself. Then the fog deepened, and the crawling train came to a dead stop at the next station. The whole line was blocked. Four precious hours were hopelessly lost.

Yet despite his impatience, he reentered London with the same dazed semi-consciousness of feeling as on the night he had first arrived. There seemed to have been no interim; his visit to the rectory and Hall, and even his fateful news, were only a dream. He drove through the same shadow to the hotel, was received by the same halo-encircled lights that had never been put out. After glancing through the halls and reading room he hurriedly made his way to his companion’s room. The captain was not there. He quickly summoned the waiter. The gentleman? Yes; Captain Dornton had left with his servant, Redhill, a few hours after Mr. Trent went away. He had left no message.

Again condemned to wait in inactivity, Randolph tried to resist a certain uneasiness that was creeping over him, by attributing the captain’s absence to some unexpected legal consultation or the gathering of evidence, his prolonged detention being due to the same fog that had delayed his own train. But he was somewhat surprised to find that the captain had ordered his luggage into the porter’s care in the hall below before leaving, and that nothing remained in his room but a few toilet articles and the fateful portmanteau. The hours passed slowly. Owing to that perpetual twilight in which he had passed the day, there seemed no perceptible flight of time, and at eleven o’clock, the captain not arriving, he determined to wait in the latter’s room so as to be sure not to miss him. Twelve o’clock boomed from an adjacent invisible steeple, but still he came not. Overcome by the fatigue and excitement of the day, Randolph concluded to lie down in his clothes on the captain’s bed, not without a superstitious and uncomfortable recollection of that night, about a year before, when he had awaited him vainly at the San Francisco hotel. Even the fateful portmanteau was there to assist his gloomy fancy. Nevertheless, with the boom of one o’clock in his drowsy ears as his last coherent recollection, he sank into a dreamless sleep.

He was awakened by a tapping at his door, and jumped up to realize by his watch and the still burning gaslight that it was nine o’clock. But the intruder was only a waiter with a letter which he had brought to Randolph’s room in obedience to the instructions the latter had given overnight. Not doubting it was from the captain, although the handwriting of the address was unfamiliar, he eagerly broke the seal. But he was surprised to read as follows:—

DEAR MR. TRENT,—We had such sad news from the Hall after you left. Sir William was seized with a kind of fit. It appears that he had just returned from the horse show, and had given his mare to the groom while he walked to the garden entrance. The groom saw him turn at the yew hedge, and was driving to the stables when he heard a queer kind of cry, and turning back to the garden front, found poor Sir William lying on the ground in convulsions. The doctor was sent for, and Mr. Brunton and I went over to the Hall. The doctor thinks it was something like a stroke, but he is not certain, and Sir William is quite delirious, and doesn’t recognize anybody. I gathered from the groom that he had been DRINKING HEAVILY. Perhaps it was well that you did not see him, but I thought you ought to know what had happened in case you came down again. It’s all very dreadful, and I wonder if that is why I was so nervous all the afternoon. It may have been a kind of presentiment. Don’t you think so?

Yours faithfully, SIBYL EVERSLEIGH.

I am afraid Randolph thought more of the simple-minded girl who, in the midst of her excitement, turned to him half unconsciously, than he did of Sir William. Had it not been for the necessity of seeing the captain, he would probably have taken the next train to the rectory. Perhaps he might later. He thought little of Sir William’s illness, and was inclined to accept the young girl’s naive suggestion of its cause. He read and reread the letter, staring at the large, grave, childlike handwriting—so like herself—and obeying a sudden impulse, raised the signature, as gravely as if it had been her hand, to his lips.

Still the day advanced and the captain came not. Randolph found the inactivity insupportable. He knew not where to seek him; he had no more clue to his resorts or his friends—if, indeed, he had any in London—than he had after their memorable first meeting in San Francisco. He might, indeed, be the dupe of an impostor, who, at the eleventh hour, had turned craven and fled. He might be, in the captain’s indifference, a mere instrument set aside at his pleasure. Yet he could take advantage of Miss Eversleigh’s letter and seek her, and confess everything, and ask her advice. It was a great and at the moment it seemed to him an overwhelming temptation. But only for the moment. He had given his word to the captain—more, he had given his youthful FAITH. And, to his credit, he never swerved again. It seemed to him, too, in his youthful superstition, as he looked at the abandoned portmanteau, that he had again to take up his burden—his “trust.”

It was nearly four o’clock when the spell was broken. A large packet, bearing the printed address of a London and American bank, was brought to him by a special messenger; but the written direction was in the captain’s hand. Randolph tore it open. It contained one or two inclosures, which he hastily put aside for the letter, two pages of foolscap, which he read breathlessly:—

DEAR TRENT,—Don’t worry your head if I have slipped my cable without telling you. I’m all right, only I got the news you are bringing me, JUST AFTER YOU LEFT, by Jack Redhill, whom I had sent to Dornton Hall to see how the land lay the night before. It was not that I didn’t trust YOU, but HE had ways of getting news that you wouldn’t stoop to. You can guess, from what I have told you already, that, now Bobby is gone, there’s nothing to keep me here, and I’m following my own idea of letting the whole blasted thing slide. I only worked this racket for the sake of him. I’m sorry for him, but I suppose the poor little beggar couldn’t stand these sunless, God-forsaken longitudes any more than I could. Besides that, as I didn’t want to trust any lawyer with my secret, I myself had hunted up some books on the matter, and found that, by the law of entail, I’d have to rip up the whole blessed thing, and Bill would have had to pay back every blessed cent of what rents he had collected since he took hold—not to ME, but the ESTATE—with interest, and that no arrangement I could make with HIM would be legal on account of the boy. At least, that’s the way the thing seemed to pan out to me. So that when I heard of Bobby’s death I was glad to jump the rest, and that’s what I made up my mind to do.

But, like a blasted lubber, now that I COULD do it and cut right away, I must needs think that I’d like first to see Bill on the sly, without letting on to any one else, and tell him what I was going to do. I’d no fear that he’d object, or that he’d hesitate a minute to fall in with my plan of dropping my name and my game, and giving him full swing, while I stood out to sea and the South Pacific, and dropped out of his mess for the rest of my life. Perhaps I wanted to set his mind at rest, if he’d ever had any doubts; perhaps I wanted to have a little fun out of him for his d–d previousness; perhaps, lad, I had a hankering to see the old place for the last time. At any rate, I allowed to go to Dornton Hall. I timed myself to get there about the hour you left, to keep out of sight until I knew he was returning from the horse show, and to waylay him ALONE and have our little talk without witnesses. I daren’t go to the Hall, for some of the old servants might recognize me.

I went down there with Jack Redhill, and we separated at the station. I hung around in the fog. I even saw you pass with Sibyl in the dogcart, but you didn’t see me. I knew the place, and just where to hide where I could have the chance of seeing him alone. But it was a beastly job waiting there. I felt like a d–d thief instead of a man who was simply visiting his own. Yet, you mayn’t believe me, lad, but I hated the place and all it meant more than ever. Then, by and by, I heard him coming. I had arranged it all with myself to get into the yew hedge, and step out as he came to the garden entrance, and as soon as he recognized me to get him round the terrace into the summer house, where we could speak without danger.

I heard the groom drive away to the stable with the cart, and, sure enough, in a minute he came lurching along toward the garden door. He was mighty unsteady on his pins, and I reckon he was more than half full, which was a bad lookout for our confab. But I calculated that the sight of me, when I slipped out, would sober him. And, by –, it did! For his eyes bulged out of his head and got fixed there; his jaw dropped; he tried to strike at me with a hunting crop he was carrying, and then he uttered an ungodly yell you might have heard at the station, and dropped down in his tracks. I had just time to slip back into the hedge again before the groom came driving back, and then all hands were piped, and they took him into the house.

And of course the game was up, and I lost my only chance. I was thankful enough to get clean away without discovering myself, and I have to trust now to the fact of Bill’s being drunk, and thinking it was my ghost that he saw, in a touch of the jimjams! And I’m not sorry to have given him that start, for there was that in his eye, and that in the stroke he made, my lad, that showed a guilty conscience I hadn’t reckoned on. And it cured me of my wish to set his mind at ease. He’s welcome to all the rest.

And that’s why I’m going away—never to return. I’m sorry I couldn’t take you with me, but it’s better that I shouldn’t see you again, and that you didn’t even know WHERE I was gone. When you get this I shall be on blue water and heading for the sunshine. You’ll find two letters inclosed. One you need not open unless you hear that my secret was blown, and you are ever called upon to explain your relations with me. The other is my thanks, my lad, in a letter of credit on the bank, for the way you have kept your trust, and I believe will continue to keep it, to

JOHN DORNTON.

P.S. I hope you dropped a tear over my swell tomb at Dornton Church. All the same, I don’t begrudge it to the poor devil who lost his life instead of me.

J. D.

As Randolph read, he seemed to hear the captain’s voice throughout the letter, and even his low, characteristic laugh in the postscript. Then he suddenly remembered the luggage which the porter had said the captain had ordered to be taken below; but on asking that functionary he was told a conveyance for the Victoria Docks had called with an order, and taken it away at daybreak. It was evident that the captain had intended the letter should be his only farewell. Depressed and a little hurt at his patron’s abruptness, Randolph returned to his room. Opening the letter of credit, he found it was for a thousand pounds—a munificent beneficence, as it seemed to Randolph, for his dubious services, and a proof of his patron’s frequent declarations that he had money enough without touching the Dornton estates.

For a long time he sat with these sole evidences of the reality of his experience in his hands, a prey to a thousand surmises and conflicting thoughts. Was he the self-deceived disciple of a visionary, a generous, unselfish, but weak man, whose eccentricity passed even the bounds of reason? Who would believe the captain’s story or the captain’s motives? Who comprehend his strange quest and its stranger and almost ridiculous termination? Even if the seal of secrecy were removed in after years, what had he, Randolph, to show in corroboration of his patron’s claim?

Then it occurred to him that there was no reason why he should not go down to the rectory and see Miss Eversleigh again under pretense of inquiring after the luckless baronet, whose title and fortune had, nevertheless, been so strangely preserved. He began at once his preparations for the journey, and was nearly ready when a servant entered with a telegram. Randolph’s heart leaped. The captain had sent him news—perhaps had changed his mind! He tore off the yellow cover, and read,—

Sir William died at twelve o’clock without recovering consciousness.

S. EVERSLEIGH. VI

For a moment Randolph gazed at the dispatch with a half-hysterical laugh, and then became as suddenly sane and cool. One thought alone was uppermost in his mind: the captain could not have heard this news yet, and if he was still within reach, or accessible by any means whatever, however determined his purpose, he must know it at once. The only clue to his whereabouts was the Victoria Docks. But that was something. In another moment Randolph was in the lower hall, had learned the quickest way of reaching the docks, and plunged into the street.

The fog here swooped down, and to the embarrassment of his mind was added the obscurity of light and distance, which halted him after a few hurried steps, in utter perplexity. Indistinct figures were here and there approaching him out of nothingness and melting away again into the greenish gray chaos. He was in a busy thoroughfare; he could hear the slow trample of hoofs, the dull crawling of vehicles, and the warning outcries of a traffic he could not see. Trusting rather to his own speed than that of a halting conveyance, he blundered on until he reached the railway station. A short but exasperating journey of impulses and hesitations, of detonating signals and warning whistles, and he at last stood on the docks, beyond him a vague bulk or two, and a soft, opaque flowing wall—the river!

But one steamer had left that day—the Dom Pedro, for the River Plate—two hours before, but until the fog thickened, a quarter of an hour ago, she could be seen, so his informant said, still lying, with steam up, in midstream. Yes, it was still possible to board her. But even as the boatman spoke, and was leading the way toward the landing steps, the fog suddenly lightened; a soft salt breath stole in from the distant sea, and a veil seemed to be lifted from the face of the gray waters. The outlines of the two shores came back; the spars of nearer vessels showed distinctly, but the space where the huge hulk had rested was empty and void. There was a trail of something darker and more opaque than fog itself lying near the surface of the water, but the Dom Pedro was a mere speck in the broadening distance.

A bright sun and a keen easterly wind were revealing the curling ridges of the sea beyond the headland when Randolph again passed the gates of Dornton Hall on his way to the rectory. Now, for the first time, he was able to see clearly the outlines of that spot which had seemed to him only a misty dream, and even in his preoccupation he was struck by its grave beauty. The leafless limes and elms in the park grouped themselves as part of the picturesque details of the Hall they encompassed, and the evergreen slope of firs and larches rose as a background to the gray battlements, covered with dark green ivy, whose rich shadows were brought out by the unwonted sunshine. With a half-repugnant curiosity he had tried to identify the garden entrance and the fateful yew hedge the captain had spoken of as he passed. But as quickly he fell back upon the resolution he had taken in coming there—to dissociate his secret, his experience, and his responsibility to his patron from his relations to Sibyl Eversleigh; to enjoy her companionship without an obtruding thought of the strange circumstances that had brought them together at first, or the stranger fortune that had later renewed their acquaintance. He had resolved to think of her as if she had merely passed into his life in the casual ways of society, with only her personal charms to set her apart from others. Why should his exclusive possession of a secret—which, even if confided to her, would only give her needless and hopeless anxiety—debar them from an exchange of those other confidences of youth and sympathy? Why could he not love her and yet withhold from her the knowledge of her cousin’s existence? So he had determined to make the most of his opportunity during his brief holiday; to avail himself of her naive invitation, and even of what he dared sometimes to think was her predilection for his companionship. And if, before he left, he had acquired a right to look forward to a time when her future and his should be one—but here his glowing fancy was abruptly checked by his arrival at the rectory door.