“Yes,” he said later, as he stood at the window in the Long Gallery and looked forth.  “God grant I have come home.”

What hours, what days and nights he spent in the weeks that followed.  In truth they were too full of intense feeling to be wholly happy.  Many a night he woke trembling from dreams of anguish.  There were three dreams which came again and again—­one was of the morning when she galloped past him in the narrow lane with the strange look in her eyes, and he never dreamed it without a nightmare sense of mad despair and loss from which his own wild cry to her would wake him; another was of the night she passed him on the stair, and did not see him.  Oh, God (for ’twas in this wise the dream always came), she did not see him.  She passed him by again.  And there was left only the rose lying at his feet.  And he should never see her face again!  And one was of the night he spent in his room alone at Dunstan’s Wolde—­the night when he had torn the laces from his throat that he might breathe, and had known himself a frenzied man—­while her happy bridegroom to be had slept and dreamed of her.

From such dreams he would waken with an unreasoning terror—­a nightmare in itself—­a sense that even now, even when both were free and he had seen that in her eyes his soul sought for and cried out to—­even now some Fate might come between and tear them apart, that their hearts should never beat against each other—­never!  And, in truth, cold sweat would break forth on his body and he would spring from his bed and pace to and fro, lighting the tapers that he might drive the darkness from him.

“Naught shall come between!” he would cry.  “Naught under God’s Heaven—­naught on Gods’ earth!  No man, nor fate, nor devil!”

For he had borne his burden too long, and even for his strength and endurance its heaviness had been too great.

In these weeks of solitude at Camylott he thought much of him who had passed from earth, of the years they had been friends, of the days they had ridden through the green lanes together or walked in the Long Gallery, he himself but a child, the other his mature and affectionate companion.  He had loved and been beloved, and now he was gone, leaving behind him no memory which was not tender and full of affectionate reverence.

“Never,” was Osmonde’s thought, “in all the years we knew each other did I hear him utter a thought which was ungenerous or unjust.  You, my lord,” he found himself saying aloud one day, “have sure left earth’s regrets behind and see with clearer eyes than ours.  A man—­loving as you yourself loved, yearning as you yourself yearned—­you will but pity with a tender soul.”

And he could but remember his last interview with Mistress Anne on his bidding farewell to Dunstan’s Wolde after the funeral obsequies.