Page:The Unspeakable Gentleman (IA unspeakablegent00marq).pdf/199



It was just that time in an autumn day when the light is fading out of the sky. The thick, heavy mists that the cold air encourages were roiling in chill and heavy from the river and leveling the hollow places in the land. The clouds were still a claret colored purple in the west, but in another few minutes that color would be gone. The shapes around us were fast losing their distinctiveness, and their outlines were becoming more and more a matter for the memory, and not the eye. And it seems to me that I never knew the air to seem more fresh and sweet.

We had broken into a sharp gallop down the rutted lane. The house, gaunt and spectral, and bleaker and more forbidding fen the darkening sky, was behind us, and ahead were the broad level meadows, checkered with little clamps of willow and cedars, as meadows are that lie near the salt marshes. I had feared we might be intercepted at our gate, but I was mistaken. We had swerved to the left and were thudding