Antony Gray-Gardener Part 26

"Well?" he queried.

"It's all so exactly the same," responded Trix.

"I never cared for change," said Nicholas shortly.

And then the door opened.

"Jessop," said Nicholas smooth-voiced, "Will you kindly bring tea for me and this young lady."

A flicker, a very faint flicker of amazement pa.s.sed over the man's face.

"Yes, sir," he responded, and turned from the room.

"An excellent servant," remarked Nicholas.

"I wonder," said Trix reflectively, "how they manage to see everything, and look as if they saw nothing. When I see things it's perfectly obvious to everyone else I am seeing them. I--I _look_."

"So do most people," returned Nicholas.

When, some half-hour later, Trix rose to take leave, Nicholas again held out his hand. "I believe I'd ask you to come and pay me another visit,"

he said, "but it would be wiser not. It is not easy for--er, dead men to receive visitors."

"I wish you hadn't--died," said Trix impulsively.

"Do you mean that?" asked Nicholas curiously.

Trix nodded. There was an odd lump in her throat, a lump that for the moment prevented her from speaking.

"You're a queer child," smiled Nicholas.

The tears welled up suddenly in Trix's eyes.

"It's so lonely," she said, with a half-sob.

"My own doing," responded Nicholas.

"That doesn't make it nicer, but worse," gulped Trix.

Nicholas held her hand tighter.

"On the contrary, it's better. It's my own choice." He emphasized the last word a little.

Trix was silent. Nicholas let go her hand.

"Let yourself out the front way," he said. "I am sorry I am unable to accompany you."

Trix went slowly to the library door. At the door she turned.

"It mayn't be right of me," she announced, "but I'm glad, really glad I did sneeze."

Nicholas laughed.

"To be perfectly candid," he remarked, "so am I."

CHAPTER XXIII

ANTONY FINDS A GLOVE

Trix's appearance at the door in the wall had fairly dumbfounded Antony.

He had recognized her instantly. And the amazing thing was that she was exactly as he had seen her in his dream. Her announcement had carried the dream sense further, and it was with a queer feeling of intense disappointment that he found no one standing outside the gate. There was nothing but the silent deserted wood and the mound of leaf-mould. For a moment or so he stood listening, almost expecting to hear a footstep among the trees. Nothing but silence greeted him, however, broken only by the faint rustling of the leaves.

He turned back to the garden. It was empty. There was nothing, nothing on earth to prove that the whole thing had not been an extraordinarily vivid waking dream. And if it were a dream, surely it was calculated to dispel the relief the first dream had brought him. Yet was it a dream? Could it have been? Wasn't he entirely awake, and in the possession of his right senses?

Demanding thus of his soul, solemn, bewildered, and reflective, he turned once more to his wheelbarrow. Ten minutes later, trundling it down a cinder path, his eye fell on an object lying beneath a gooseberry bush.

He dropped the barrow, and picked up the object.

It was a long soft doe-skin glove.

"It wasn't a dream," said Antony triumphantly. "But where in the name of all that's wonderful did she come from? And where did she vanish to?"

He put the glove into his pocket, and resumed his work.

"I am afraid," he remarked to himself as he heaved the leaf-mould out of the barrow, "that she knew perfectly well there was no one at the gate. I wonder why she said there was, and why, above all, she made such an extraordinarily unexpected appearance."

These considerations engrossed his mind for at least the next half-hour, when, the leaf-mould having been transported from the wood, he went round to the front of the house to trim the edges of the lawn. He was on his knees on the gravel path, busily engaged with a pair of shears, when he heard the amazing sound of the front door opening and shutting. He looked round over his shoulder, to see the same apparition that had appeared to him from the wood, walking calmly down the steps and in the direction of the drive. Apparently she was too engrossed with her own thoughts to observe him where he was kneeling at a little distance to the eastward of the front door.

"Well!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Antony bewildered. And he gazed after her.

It was not till her white dress had become a speck in the distance, that Antony remembered the long soft glove reposing in his pocket. He dropped his shears, and bolted after her.

Trix was half-way down the drive, when she heard rapid steps behind her.

She looked back, to see that she was being pursued by the young man who had formerly been trundling a wheelbarrow.

Her first instinct was one of flight. Her second, conscious that the owner of the property had condoned her intrusion, and also having in view the fact that there was nowhere but straight ahead to run, and he was in all probability fleeter of foot than she, was to stand her ground, and that as unconcernedly as possible.

"Yes?" queried Trix with studied calmness, as he came up to her.

"Excuse me, Miss, but you dropped this in the kitchen garden." Antony held out the long soft glove.

"Oh, thank you," said Trix, infinitely relieved that his rapid approach had signified nothing worse than the restoration of her own lost property. And then she looked at him. Where on earth had she seen him before?

"There wasn't any one at the gate, Miss," said Antony suddenly.