Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/127

 cent fellow—and if he'd been home he'd never have allowed any of this to happen.

"Well, the war came when she was quite a kid. I was away most of that time. Then in 1918 my father died and left me a bit of property there in Milton. I came home and asked her to marry me. She thought I was pitying her, and anyway she didn't love me. And I hadn't enough of this world's goods to make the old man keen about me.

"Then this devil came along," Dunbar stopped for a moment. They both listened. There was not a sound in the whole house.

"What brought him to a village like yours?" asked Harkness, lowering his voice. "I shouldn't have thought that a man like that"

"No, you wouldn't," said Dunbar. "But that's one of his passions apparently, suddenly landing on some small village where there's a big house and bossing every one around him.... I shall never forget the day I first saw him. It was just about a year ago.

"I had heard that some foreigner had taken Haxt, that was the big house in Milton that the Dombeys, the owners, were too poor to keep up. Soon all the village was talking. Furniture arrived, then lots of servants, Japs and all sorts. Then one evening going up the hill I saw him leaning over one of the Haxt gates looking into the road,

"It was a lovely July evening and he was without