The woman at the door [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE HE FIRST SAW THE TOWER WHEN THE LARCHES WERE turning green. The heath, bearded with the bronze of last year's bracken, and stippled with Scotch firs, rose suddenly towards the south. The skyline was spired with the green larch-tops, and interspersed with the larches were old oaks and firs. It was one of those poignant days in April when the wind is in the south-west, and there is a whisper of spring in the air. Sunlight and shadows came and went. The flicker of sunlight on some bright surface was the first thing to catch Luce's attention. In this wild and solitary place he had supposed himself free of man and his bricks and mortar. There still were solitary places in Surrey. He had followed a lane in the deep valley where the soil was richer and beech trees grew. He had passed a farm, and beyond it the lane had died away in the hollow of an old quarry or sand-pit, and Luce had taken to the heathland where ploughs had never turned the earth. Glass—sunlight on a window! But high up among the tree-tops! And then he noticed a trackway less than a yard wide snaking its way amid the dry bracken and the heather. He followed the path, and as the network of winter boughs grew thin he saw, as through a kind of veil, a tall, grey tower. Had he been a man of simpler reactions he might have greeted this ghost of a building with a 'Well,—I'm damned 1' Certainly, he stood and stared at it. Almost it suggested some mysterious exclamation-mark reared in brick and mortar by some whimsical madman. But why and when? —Somebody's Folly? The Stylite's Pillar of some recluse? That might not seem madness to a star-gazer and a dreamer of dreams, and John Luce was such a creature. He was conscious of a feeling of quickened heart-beats and of breathlessness, like a mystic who had discovered something strange in a world where strangeness is forbidden by bureaucrats and by-laws. There was a little clearing here in the woods, an orchard '5