When Christopher left the house shortly after, instead of going into the town on some errand, as was customary whenever he went from home after dark, he ascended a back street, passed over the hills behind, and walked at a brisk pace inland along the road to Rookington Park, where, as he had learnt, Ethelberta and Lady Petherwin were staying for a time, the day or two which they spent at Wyndway having formed a short break in the middle of this visit.  The moon was shining to-night, and Christopher sped onwards over the pallid high-road as readily as he could have done at noonday.  In three-quarters of an hour he reached the park gates; and entering now upon a tract which he had never before explored, he went along more cautiously and with some uncertainty as to the precise direction that the road would take.  A frosted expanse of even grass, on which the shadow of his head appeared with an opal halo round it, soon allowed the house to be discovered beyond, the other portions of the park abounding with timber older and finer than that of any other spot in the neighbourhood.  Christopher withdrew into the shade, and wheeled round to the front of the building that contained his old love.  Here he gazed and idled, as many a man has done before him—­wondering which room the fair poetess occupied, waiting till lights began to appear in the upper windows—­which they did as uncertainly as glow-worms blinking up at eventide—­and warming with currents of revived feeling in perhaps the sweetest of all conditions.  New love is brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth.

Occupied thus, Christopher was greatly surprised to see, on casually glancing to one side, another man standing close to the shadowy trunk of another tree, in a similar attitude to his own, gazing, with arms folded, as blankly at the windows of the house as Christopher himself had been gazing.  Not willing to be discovered, Christopher stuck closer to his tree.  While he waited thus, the stranger began murmuring words, in a slow soft voice.  Christopher listened till he heard the following:—­

   ’Pale was the day and rayless, love,
      That had an eve so dim.’

Two well-known lines from one of Ethelberta’s poems.

Jealousy is a familiar kind of heat which disfigures, licks playfully, clouds, blackens, and boils a man as a fire does a pot; and on recognizing these pilferings from what he had grown to regard as his own treasury, Christopher’s fingers began to nestle with great vigour in the palms of his hands.  Three or four minutes passed, when the unknown rival gave a last glance at the windows, and walked away.  Christopher did not like the look of that walk at all—­there was grace enough in it to suggest that his antagonist had no mean chance of finding favour in a woman’s eyes.  A sigh, too, seemed to proceed from the stranger’s breast; but as their distance apart was too great for any such sound to be heard by any possibility, Christopher set down that to imagination, or to the brushing of the wind over the trees.