The inn called the Rising Sun had an exterior rather suggesting the
title of the Setting Sun. It stood in a narrow triangle of garden, more
grey than green, with broken-down hedges mingling with the melancholy
reeds of a river; with a few dark and dank arbours, of which the roofs
and the seats had alike collapsed; and a dingy dried-up fountain, with a
weather-stained water-nymph and no water. The house itself seemed rather
devoured by ivy than decorated with it; as if its old bones of brown
brick were slowly broken by the dragon coils of that gigantic parasite.
On the other side it looked on a lonely road leading across the hills
down to a ford across the river; now largely disused since the building
of a bridge lower down. Outside the door was a wooden bench and table,
and above it a wooden sign, much darkened, with the gold of the sun's
disc faded to a brown; and under the sign stood the inn-keeper, gazing
gloomily up the road. His hair was black and flat, and his face, of a
congested purple, had all the sombreness, if not all the beauty, of
sunset.

The only person in the place who exhibited any liveliness was the person
who was leaving it. He was the first and last customer for many months;
a solitary swallow who had conspicuously failed to make a summer; and
the swallow was now flitting. He was a medical man on a holiday; young,
and of an agreeable ugliness, with a humorous hatchet face and red hair;
and the cat-like activity of his movements contrasted with the stagnant
inertia of the inn by the ford. He was strapping up his own bag on the
table under the sign; and neither his host, who stood a yard off, nor
the single servant, who moved heavily and obscurely within, offered to
help him; possibly through sulkiness, possibly merely through dreaminess
and disuse.

The long silence, idle or busy, was broken for the first time by two
sharp and explosive sounds. The first was the abrupt bursting of the
strap which the doctor was tightening round the bag on the table; and
the second was the loud and cheerful "Damn!" which was his comment upon
it.

"Here's a pretty go," observed the medical gentleman, who went by the
name of Garth; "I shall have to tie it up with something. Have you got a
cord or a rope or anything?"

The melancholy inn-keeper turned very slowly and went indoors, coming
out presently with a length of dusty rope in a loop like a halter,
probably for tethering a donkey or a calf.

"That's all I've got," he said; "I'm pretty well at the end of my own
tether anyhow."

"You seem a bit depressed," observed Dr. Garth; "you probably want a
tonic. Perhaps this medicine chest burst open to give you one."

"Prussic acid is the kind of tonic I feel inclined for," answered the
landlord of the Rising Sun.

"I never recommend it," observed the doctor cheerfully. "It's very
pleasant at the moment, no doubt; but I never feel I can guarantee a
complete recovery afterwards. But you certainly seem down in the mouth;
you didn't even brighten up when I indulged in such an eccentricity as
paying my bill."

"Much obliged to you, sir," observed the other gruffly, "but it would
want a lot more bills to keep this rotten old show from going to pot. It
was a good business once, when the right-of-way was open beyond the
river, and everybody used this ford. But the last squire shut up the
path somehow; and now everything goes by the new bridge a mile away.
Nobody comes this way; and, saving your presence, I don't know why
anybody should."

"Well, they say the new squire is nearly bankrupt himself," observed Dr.
Garth. "So history brings its revenges. Westermaine's his name, isn't
it? I'm told there's a brother and sister living in the big house over
there, with precious little to live on. I suppose the whole
countryside's rather gone downhill. But you're wrong about nobody coming
here," he added suddenly, "for there are two men coming over the hill
now."

The road ran across the valley at right angles to the river; beyond the
ford the forgotten right-of-way could be traced more faintly up the
slope to where the ruined gate that marked Westermaine Abbey stood dark
against clouds of a pallor that was faintly lurid, as with a hint of
storm. But on the other side of the valley the sky was clear; and the
early afternoon seemed as bright and brisk as morning. And on this side,
where the white road curved over the hill, two figures were advancing,
which seemed, even when they were hardly more than dots in the distance,
to be markedly dissimilar.

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