He soon began to notice in the sky a slight yellow halo, near the horizon.  It rapidly increased; it changed colour, and grew redder; then the glare visibly brightened and dimmed at intervals, showing that its origin was affected by the strong wind prevailing.

Manston reined in his horse on the summit of a hill, and considered.

‘It is a rick-yard on fire,’ he thought; ’no house could produce such a raging flame so suddenly.’

He trotted on again, attempting to particularize the local features in the neighbourhood of the fire; but this it was too dark to do, and the excessive winding of the roads misled him as to its direction, not being an old inhabitant of the district, or a countryman used to forming such judgments; whilst the brilliancy of the light shortened its real remoteness to an apparent distance of not more than half:  it seemed so near that he again stopped his horse, this time to listen; but he could hear no sound.

Entering now a narrow valley, the sides of which obscured the sky to an angle of perhaps thirty or forty degrees above the mathematical horizon, he was obliged to suspend his judgment till he was in possession of further knowledge, having however assumed in the interim, that the fire was somewhere between Carriford Road Station and the village.

The self-same glare had just arrested the eyes of another man.  He was at that minute gliding along several miles to the east of the steward’s position, but nearing the same point as that to which Manston tended.  The younger Edward Springrove was returning from London to his father’s house by the identical train which the steward was expecting to bring his wife, the truth being that Edward’s lateness was owing to the simplest of all causes, his temporary want of money, which led him to make a slow journey for the sake of travelling at third-class fare.

Springrove had received Cytherea’s bitter and admonitory letter, and he was clearly awakened to a perception of the false position in which he had placed himself, by keeping silence at Budmouth on his long engagement.  An increasing reluctance to put an end to those few days of ecstasy with Cytherea had overruled his conscience, and tied his tongue till speaking was too late.

‘Why did I do it? how could I dream of loving her?’ he asked himself as he walked by day, as he tossed on his bed by night:  ’miserable folly!’

An impressionable heart had for years—­perhaps as many as six or seven years—­been distracting him, by unconsciously setting itself to yearn for somebody wanting, he scarcely knew whom.  Echoes of himself, though rarely, he now and then found.  Sometimes they were men, sometimes women, his cousin Adelaide being one of these; for in spite of a fashion which pervades the whole community at the present day—­the habit of exclaiming that woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse, the fact remains that, after all, women are Mankind, and that in many of the sentiments of life the difference of sex is but a difference of degree.