‘And off went the baronet to Myrtle Villa?’
‘O no! he went away for many years. ‘Tis quite lately, since his illness, that he came to that little place, in zight of the stone walls that were the pride of his forefathers.’
‘From what I hear, he has not the manner of a broken-hearted man?’
‘Not at all. Since that illness he has been happy, as you see him: no pride, quite calm and mild; at new moon quite childish. ‘Tis that makes him able to live there; before he was so ill he couldn’t bear a zight of the place, but since then he is happy nowhere else, and never leaves the parish further than to drive once a week to Markton. His head won’t stand society nowadays, and he lives quite lonely as you zee, only zeeing his daughter, or his son whenever he comes home, which is not often. They say that if his brain hadn’t softened a little he would ha’ died – ‘twas that saved his life.’
‘What’s this I hear about his daughter? Is she really hired companion to the new owner?’
‘Now that’s a curious thing again, these two girls being so fond of one another; one of ‘em a dissenter, and all that, and t’other a De Stancy. O no, not hired exactly, but she mostly lives with Miss Power, and goes about with her, and I dare say Miss Power makes it wo’th her while. One can’t move a step without the other following; though judging by ordinary volks you’d think ‘twould be a cat-and-dog friendship rather.’
‘But ‘tis not?’
‘’Tis not; they be more like lovers than maid and maid. Miss Power is looked up to by little De Stancy as if she were a god-a’mighty, and Miss Power lets her love her to her heart’s content. But whether Miss Power loves back again I can’t zay, for she’s as deep as the North Star.’
The landlord here left the stranger to go to some other part of the house, and Somerset drew near to the glass partition to gain a glimpse of a man whose interest in the neighbourhood seemed to have arisen so simultaneously with his own. But the inner room was empty: the man had apparently departed by another door.
VI
The telegraph had almost the attributes of a human being at Stancy Castle. When its bell rang people rushed to the old tapestried chamber allotted to it, and waited its pleasure with all the deference due to such a novel inhabitant of that ancestral pile. This happened on the following afternoon about four o’clock, while Somerset was sketching in the room adjoining that occupied by the instrument. Hearing its call, he looked in to learn if anybody were attending, and found Miss De Stancy bending over it.
She welcomed him without the least embarrassment. ‘Another message,’ she said. – ‘"Paula to Charlotte. – Have returned to Markton. Am starting for home. Will be at the gate between four and five if possible.”’
Miss De Stancy blushed with pleasure when she raised her eyes from the machine. ‘Is she not thoughtful to let me know beforehand?’
Somerset said she certainly appeared to be, feeling at the same time that he was not in possession of sufficient data to make the opinion of great value.
‘Now I must get everything ready, and order what she will want, as Mrs. Goodman is away. What will she want? Dinner would be best – she has had no lunch, I know; or tea perhaps, and dinner at the usual time. Still, if she has had no lunch – Hark, what do I hear?’
She ran to an arrow-slit, and Somerset, who had also heard something, looked out of an adjoining one. They could see from their elevated position a great way along the white road, stretching like a tape amid the green expanses on each side. There had arisen a cloud of dust, accompanied by a noise of wheels.
‘It is she,’ said Charlotte. ‘O yes – it is past four – the telegram has been delayed.’
‘How would she be likely to come?’
‘She has doubtless hired a carriage at the inn: she said it would be useless to send to meet her, as she couldn’t name a time… Where is she now?’
‘Just where the boughs of those beeches overhang the road – there she is again!’
Miss De Stancy went away to give directions, and Somerset continued to watch. The vehicle, which was of no great pretension, soon crossed the bridge and stopped: there was a ring at the bell; and Miss De Stancy reappeared.
‘Did you see her as she drove up – is she not interesting?’
‘I could not see her.’
‘Ah, no – of course you could not from this window because of the trees. Mr. Somerset, will you come downstairs? You will have to meet her, you know.’
Somerset felt an indescribable backwardness. ‘I will go on with my sketching,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she will not be – ’
‘O, but it would be quite natural, would it not? Our manners are easier here, you know, than they are in town, and Miss Power has adapted herself to them.’
A compromise was effected by Somerset declaring that he would hold himself in readiness to be discovered on the landing at any convenient time.
A servant entered. ‘Miss Power?’ said Miss De Stancy, before he could speak.
The man advanced with a card: Miss De Stancy took it up, and read thereon: ‘Mr. William Dare.’
‘It is not Miss Power who has come, then?’ she asked, with a disappointed face.
‘No, ma’am.’
She looked again at the card. ‘This is some man of business, I suppose – does he want to see me?’
‘Yes, miss. Leastwise, he would be glad to see you if Miss Power is not at home.’
Miss De Stancy left the room, and soon returned, saying, ‘Mr. Somerset, can you give me your counsel in this matter? This Mr. Dare says he is a photographic amateur, and it seems that he wrote some time ago to Miss Power, who gave him permission to take views of the castle, and promised to show him the best points. But I have heard nothing of it, and scarcely know whether I ought to take his word in her absence. Mrs. Goodman, Miss Power’s relative, who usually attends to these things, is away.’
‘I dare say it is all right,’ said Somerset.
‘Would you mind seeing him? If you think it quite in order, perhaps you will instruct him where the best views are to be obtained?’
Thereupon Somerset at once went down to Mr. Dare. His coming as a sort of counterfeit of Miss Power disposed Somerset to judge him with as much severity as justice would allow, and his manner for the moment was not of a kind calculated to dissipate antagonistic instincts. Mr. Dare was standing before the fireplace with his feet wide apart, and his hands in the pockets of his coat-tails, looking at a carving over the mantelpiece. He turned quickly at the sound of Somerset’s footsteps, and revealed himself as a person quite out of the common.
His age it was impossible to say. There was not a hair on his face which could serve to hang a guess upon. In repose he appeared a boy; but his actions were so completely those of a man that the beholder’s first estimate of sixteen as his age was hastily corrected to six-and-twenty, and afterwards shifted hither and thither along intervening years as the tenor of his sentences sent him up or down. He had a broad forehead, vertical as the face of a bastion, and his hair, which was parted in the middle, hung as a fringe or valance above, in the fashion sometimes affected by the other sex. He wore a heavy ring, of which the gold seemed fair, the diamond questionable, and the taste indifferent. There were the remains of a swagger in his body and limbs as he came forward, regarding Somerset with a confident smile, as if the wonder were, not why Mr. Dare should be present, but why Somerset should be present likewise; and the first tone that came from Dare’s lips wound up his listener’s opinion that he did not like him.
A latent power in the man, or boy, was revealed by the circumstance that Somerset did not feel, as he would ordinarily have done, that it was a matter of profound indifference to him whether this gentleman-photographer were a likeable person or no.
‘I have called by appointment; or rather, I left a card stating that to-day would suit me, and no objection was made.’ Somerset recognized the voice; it was that of the invisible stranger who had talked with the landlord about the De Stancys. Mr. Dare then proceeded to explain his business.
Somerset found from his inquiries that the man had unquestionably been instructed by somebody to take the views he spoke of; and concluded that Dare’s curiosity at the inn was, after all, naturally explained by his errand to this place. Blaming himself for a too hasty condemnation of the stranger, who though visually a little too assured was civil enough verbally, Somerset proceeded with the young photographer to sundry corners of the outer ward, and thence across the moat to the field, suggesting advantageous points of view. The office, being a shadow of his own pursuits, was not uncongenial to Somerset, and he forgot other things in attending to it.
‘Now in our country we should stand further back than this, and so get a more comprehensive coup d’oeil,’ said Dare, as Somerset selected a good situation.
‘You are not an Englishman, then,’ said Somerset.
‘I have lived mostly in India, Malta, Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Canada. I there invented a new photographic process, which I am bent upon making famous. Yet I am but a dilettante, and do not follow this art at the base dictation of what men call necessity.’
‘O indeed,’ Somerset replied.
As soon as this business was disposed of, and Mr. Dare had brought up his van and assistant to begin operations, Somerset returned to the castle entrance. While under the archway a man with a professional look drove up in a dog-cart and inquired if Miss Power were at home to-day.
‘She has not yet returned, Mr. Havill,’ was the reply.
Somerset, who had hoped to hear an affirmative by this time, thought that Miss Power was bent on disappointing him in the flesh, notwithstanding the interest she expressed in him by telegraph; and as it was now drawing towards the end of the afternoon, he walked off in the direction of his inn.
There were two or three ways to that spot, but the pleasantest was by passing through a rambling shrubbery, between whose bushes trickled a broad shallow brook, occasionally intercepted in its course by a transverse chain of old stones, evidently from the castle walls, which formed a miniature waterfall. The walk lay along the river-brink. Soon Somerset saw before him a circular summer-house formed of short sticks nailed to ornamental patterns. Outside the structure, and immediately in the path, stood a man with a book in his hand; and it was presently apparent that this gentleman was holding a conversation with some person inside the pavilion, but the back of the building being towards Somerset, the second individual could not be seen.
The speaker at one moment glanced into the interior, and at another at the advancing form of the architect, whom, though distinctly enough beheld, the other scarcely appeared to heed in the absorbing interest of his own discourse. Somerset became aware that it was the Baptist minister, whose rhetoric he had heard in the chapel yonder.
‘Now,’ continued the Baptist minister, ‘will you express to me any reason or objection whatever which induces you to withdraw from our communion? It was that of your father, and of his father before him. Any difficulty you may have met with I will honestly try to remove; for I need hardly say that in losing you we lose one of the most valued members of the Baptist church in this district. I speak with all the respect due to your position, when I ask you to realize how irreparable is the injury you inflict upon the cause here by this lukewarm backwardness.’
‘I don’t withdraw,’ said a woman’s low voice within.
‘What do you do?’
‘I decline to attend for the present.’
‘And you can give no reason for this?’
There was no reply.
‘Or for your refusal to proceed with the baptism?’
‘I have been christened.’
‘My dear young lady, it is well known that your christening was the work of your aunt, who did it unknown to your parents when she had you in her power, out of pure obstinacy to a church with which she was not in sympathy, taking you surreptitiously, and indefensibly, to the font of the Establishment; so that the rite meant and could mean nothing at all… But I fear that your new position has brought you into contact with the Paedobaptists, that they have disturbed your old principles, and so induced you to believe in the validity of that trumpery ceremony!’
‘It seems sufficient.’
‘I will demolish the basis of that seeming in three minutes, give me but that time as a listener.’
‘I have no objection.’
‘Very well… First, then, I will assume that those who have influenced you in the matter have not been able to make any impression upon one so well grounded as yourself in our distinctive doctrine, by the stale old argument drawn from circumcision?’
‘You may assume it.’
‘Good – that clears the ground. And we now come to the New Testament.’
The minister began to turn over the leaves of his little Bible, which it impressed Somerset to observe was bound with a flap, like a pocket book, the black surface of the leather being worn brown at the corners by long usage. He turned on till he came to the beginning of the New Testament, and then commenced his discourse. After explaining his position, the old man ran very ably through the arguments, citing well-known writers on the point in dispute when he required more finished sentences than his own.
The minister’s earnestness and interest in his own case led him unconsciously to include Somerset in his audience as the young man drew nearer; till, instead of fixing his eyes exclusively on the person within the summer-house, the preacher began to direct a good proportion of his discourse upon his new auditor, turning from one listener to the other attentively, without seeming to feel Somerset’s presence as superfluous.
‘And now,’ he said in conclusion, ‘I put it to you, sir, as to her: do you find any flaw in my argument? Is there, madam, a single text which, honestly interpreted, affords the least foothold for the Paedobaptists; in other words, for your opinion on the efficacy of the rite administered to you in your unconscious infancy? I put it to you both as honest and responsible beings.’ He turned again to the young man.
It happened that Somerset had been over this ground long ago. Born, so to speak, a High-Church infant, in his youth he had been of a thoughtful turn, till at one time an idea of his entering the Church had been entertained by his parents. He had formed acquaintance with men of almost every variety of doctrinal practice in this country; and, as the pleadings of each assailed him before he had arrived at an age of sufficient mental stability to resist new impressions, however badly substantiated, he inclined to each denomination as it presented itself, was
‘Everything by starts, and nothing long,’
till he had travelled through a great many beliefs and doctrines without feeling himself much better than when he set out.
A study of fonts and their origin had qualified him in this particular subject. Fully conscious of the inexpediency of contests on minor ritual differences, he yet felt a sudden impulse towards a mild intellectual tournament with the eager old man – purely as an exercise of his wits in the defence of a fair girl.
‘Sir, I accept your challenge to us,’ said Somerset, advancing to the minister’s side.
VII
At the sound of a new voice the lady in the bower started, as he could see by her outline through the crevices of the wood-work and creepers. The minister looked surprised.
‘You will lend me your Bible, sir, to assist my memory?’ he continued.
The minister held out the Bible with some reluctance, but he allowed Somerset to take it from his hand. The latter, stepping upon a large moss-covered stone which stood near, and laying his hat on a flat beech bough that rose and fell behind him, pointed to the minister to seat himself on the grass. The minister looked at the grass, and looked up again at Somerset, but did not move.
Somerset for the moment was not observing him. His new position had turned out to be exactly opposite the open side of the bower, and now for the first time he beheld the interior. On the seat was the woman who had stood beneath his eyes in the chapel, the ‘Paula’ of Miss De Stancy’s enthusiastic eulogies. She wore a summer hat, beneath which her fair curly hair formed a thicket round her forehead. It would be impossible to describe her as she then appeared. Not sensuous enough for an Aphrodite, and too subdued for a Hebe, she would yet, with the adjunct of doves or nectar, have stood sufficiently well for either of those personages, if presented in a pink morning light, and with mythological scarcity of attire.
Half in surprise she glanced up at him; and lowering her eyes again, as if no surprise were ever let influence her actions for more than a moment, she sat on as before, looking past Somerset’s position at the view down the river, visible for a long distance before her till it was lost under the bending trees.
Somerset turned over the leaves of the minister’s Bible, and began: —
‘In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the seventh chapter and the fourteenth verse – ‘.
Here the young lady raised her eyes in spite of her reserve, but it being, apparently, too much labour to keep them raised, allowed her glance to subside upon her jet necklace, extending it with the thumb of her left hand.
‘Sir!’ said the Baptist excitedly, ‘I know that passage well – it is the last refuge of the Paedobaptists – I foresee your argument. I have met it dozens of times, and it is not worth that snap of the fingers! It is worth no more than the argument from circumcision, or the Suffer-little-children argument.’
‘Then turn to the sixteenth chapter of the Acts, and the thirty-third – ’
‘That, too,’ cried the minister, ‘is answered by what I said before! I perceive, sir, that you adopt the method of a special pleader, and not that of an honest inquirer. Is it, or is it not, an answer to my proofs from the eighth chapter of the Acts, the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh verses; the sixteenth of Mark, sixteenth verse; second of Acts, forty-first verse; the tenth and the forty-seventh verse; or the eighteenth and eighth verse?’
‘Very well, then. Let me prove the point by other reasoning – by the argument from Apostolic tradition.’ He threw the minister’s book upon the grass, and proceeded with his contention, which comprised a fairly good exposition of the earliest practice of the Church and inferences therefrom. (When he reached this point an interest in his off-hand arguments was revealed by the mobile bosom of Miss Paula Power, though she still occupied herself by drawing out the necklace.) Testimony from Justin Martyr followed; with inferences from Irenaeus in the expression, ‘Omnes enim venit per semetipsum salvare; omnes inquam, qui per eum renascuntur in Deum, INFANTES et parvulos et pueros et juvenes.’ (At the sound of so much seriousness Paula turned her eyes upon the speaker with attention.) He next adduced proof of the signification of ‘renascor’ in the writings of the Fathers, as reasoned by Wall; arguments from Tertullian’s advice to defer the rite; citations from Cyprian, Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and Jerome; and briefly summed up the whole matter.
Somerset looked round for the minister as he concluded. But the old man, after standing face to face with the speaker, had turned his back upon him, and during the latter portions of the attack had moved slowly away. He now looked back; his countenance was full of commiserating reproach as he lifted his hand, twice shook his head, and said, ‘In the Epistle to the Philippians, first chapter and sixteenth verse, it is written that there are some who preach in contention and not sincerely. And in the Second Epistle to Timothy, fourth chapter and fourth verse, attention is drawn to those whose ears refuse the truth, and are turned unto fables. I wish you good afternoon, sir, and that priceless gift, SINCERITY.’
The minister vanished behind the trees; Somerset and Miss Power being left confronting each other alone.
Somerset stepped aside from the stone, hat in hand, at the same moment in which Miss Power rose from her seat. She hesitated for an instant, and said, with a pretty girlish stiffness, sweeping back the skirt of her dress to free her toes in turning: ‘Although you are personally unknown to me, I cannot leave you without expressing my deep sense of your profound scholarship, and my admiration for the thoroughness of your studies in divinity.’
‘Your opinion gives me great pleasure,’ said Somerset, bowing, and fairly blushing. ‘But, believe me, I am no scholar, and no theologian. My knowledge of the subject arises simply from the accident that some few years ago I looked into the question for a special reason. In the study of my profession I was interested in the designing of fonts and baptisteries, and by a natural process I was led to investigate the history of baptism; and some of the arguments I then learnt up still remain with me. That’s the simple explanation of my erudition.’
‘If your sermons at the church only match your address to-day, I shall not wonder at hearing that the parishioners are at last willing to attend.’
It flashed upon Somerset’s mind that she supposed him to be the new curate, of whose arrival he had casually heard, during his sojourn at the inn. Before he could bring himself to correct an error to which, perhaps, more than to anything else, was owing the friendliness of her manner, she went on, as if to escape the embarrassment of silence: —
‘I need hardly say that I at least do not doubt the sincerity of your arguments.’
‘Nevertheless, I was not altogether sincere,’ he answered.
She was silent.
‘Then why should you have delivered such a defence of me?’ she asked with simple curiosity.
Somerset involuntarily looked in her face for his answer.
Paula again teased the necklace. ‘Would you have spoken so eloquently on the other side if I – if occasion had served?’ she inquired shyly.
‘Perhaps I would.’
Another pause, till she said, ‘I, too, was insincere.’
‘You?’
‘I was.’
‘In what way?
‘In letting him, and you, think I had been at all influenced by authority, scriptural or patristic.’
‘May I ask, why, then, did you decline the ceremony the other evening?’
‘Ah, you, too, have heard of it!’ she said quickly.
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘I saw it.’
She blushed and looked down the river. ‘I cannot give my reasons,’ she said.
‘Of course not,’ said Somerset.
‘I would give a great deal to possess real logical dogmatism.’
‘So would I.’
There was a moment of embarrassment: she wanted to get away, but did not precisely know how. He would have withdrawn had she not said, as if rather oppressed by her conscience, and evidently still thinking him the curate: ‘I cannot but feel that Mr. Woodwell’s heart has been unnecessarily wounded.’
‘The minister’s?’
‘Yes. He is single-mindedness itself. He gives away nearly all he has to the poor. He works among the sick, carrying them necessaries with his own hands. He teaches the ignorant men and lads of the village when he ought to be resting at home, till he is absolutely prostrate from exhaustion, and then he sits up at night writing encouraging letters to those poor people who formerly belonged to his congregation in the village, and have now gone away. He always offends ladies, because he can’t help speaking the truth as he believes it; but he hasn’t offended me!’
Her feelings had risen towards the end, so that she finished quite warmly, and turned aside.
‘I was not in the least aware that he was such a man,’ murmured Somerset, looking wistfully after the minister… ‘Whatever you may have done, I fear that I have grievously wounded a worthy man’s heart from an idle wish to engage in a useless, unbecoming, dull, last-century argument.’
‘Not dull,’ she murmured, ‘for it interested me.’
Somerset accepted her correction willingly. ‘It was ill-considered of me, however,’ he said; ‘and in his distress he has forgotten his Bible.’ He went and picked up the worn volume from where it lay on the grass.
‘You can easily win him to forgive you, by just following, and returning the book to him,’ she observed.
‘I will,’ said the young man impulsively. And, bowing to her, he hastened along the river brink after the minister. He at length saw his friend before him, leaning over the gate which led from the private path into a lane, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand with every outward sign of abstraction. He was not conscious of Somerset’s presence till the latter touched him on the shoulder.
Never was a reconciliation effected more readily. When Somerset said that, fearing his motives might be misconstrued, he had followed to assure the minister of his goodwill and esteem, Mr. Woodwell held out his hand, and proved his friendliness in return by preparing to have the controversy on their religious differences over again from the beginning, with exhaustive detail. Somerset evaded this with alacrity, and once having won his companion to other subjects he found that the austere man had a smile as pleasant as an infant’s on the rare moments when he indulged in it; moreover, that he was warmly attached to Miss Power.
‘Though she gives me more trouble than all the rest of the Baptist church in this district,’ he said, ‘I love her as my own daughter. But I am sadly exercised to know what she is at heart. Heaven supply me with fortitude to contest her wild opinions, and intractability! But she has sweet virtues, and her conduct at times can be most endearing.’
‘I believe it!’ said Somerset, with more fervour than mere politeness required.
‘Sometimes I think those Stancy towers and lands will be a curse to her. The spirit of old papistical times still lingers in the nooks of those silent walls, like a bad odour in a still atmosphere, dulling the iconoclastic emotions of the true Puritan. It would be a pity indeed if she were to be tainted by the very situation that her father’s indomitable energy created for her.’
‘Do not be concerned about her,’ said Somerset gently. ‘She’s not a Paedobaptist at heart, although she seems so.’
Mr. Woodwell placed his finger on Somerset’s arm, saying, ‘If she’s not a Paedobaptist, or Episcopalian; if she is not vulnerable to the mediaeval influences of her mansion, lands, and new acquaintance, it is because she’s been vulnerable to what is worse: to doctrines beside which the errors of Paaedobaptists, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, are but as air.’
‘How? You astonish me.’
‘Have you heard in your metropolitan experience of a curious body of New Lights, as they think themselves?’ The minister whispered a name to his listener, as if he were fearful of being overheard.
‘O no,’ said Somerset, shaking his head, and smiling at the minister’s horror. ‘She’s not that; at least, I think not… She’s a woman; nothing more. Don’t fear for her; all will be well.’
The poor old man sighed. ‘I love her as my own. I will say no more.’
Somerset was now in haste to go back to the lady, to ease her apparent anxiety as to the result of his mission, and also because time seemed heavy in the loss of her discreet voice and soft, buoyant look. Every moment of delay began to be as two. But the minister was too earnest in his converse to see his companion’s haste, and it was not till perception was forced upon him by the actual retreat of Somerset that he remembered time to be a limited commodity. He then expressed his wish to see Somerset at his house to tea any afternoon he could spare, and receiving the other’s promise to call as soon as he could, allowed the younger man to set out for the summer-house, which he did at a smart pace. When he reached it he looked around, and found she was gone.
Somerset was immediately struck by his own lack of social dexterity. Why did he act so readily on the whimsical suggestion of another person, and follow the minister, when he might have said that he would call on Mr. Woodwell to-morrow, and, making himself known to Miss Power as the visiting architect of whom she had heard from Miss De Stancy, have had the pleasure of attending her to the castle? ‘That’s what any other man would have had wit enough to do!’ he said.
There then arose the question whether her despatching him after the minister was such an admirable act of good-nature to a good man as it had at first seemed to be. Perhaps it was simply a manoeuvre for getting rid of himself; and he remembered his doubt whether a certain light in her eyes when she inquired concerning his sincerity were innocent earnestness or the reverse. As the possibility of levity crossed his brain, his face warmed; it pained him to think that a woman so interesting could condescend to a trick of even so mild a complexion as that. He wanted to think her the soul of all that was tender, and noble, and kind. The pleasure of setting himself to win a minister’s goodwill was a little tarnished now.
VIII
That evening Somerset was so preoccupied with these things that he left all his sketching implements out-of-doors in the castle grounds. The next morning he hastened thither to secure them from being stolen or spoiled. Meanwhile he was hoping to have an opportunity of rectifying Paula’s mistake about his personality, which, having served a very good purpose in introducing them to a mutual conversation, might possibly be made just as agreeable as a thing to be explained away.
He fetched his drawing instruments, rods, sketching-blocks and other articles from the field where they had lain, and was passing under the walls with them in his hands, when there emerged from the outer archway an open landau, drawn by a pair of black horses of fine action and obviously strong pedigree, in which Paula was seated, under the shade of a white parasol with black and white ribbons fluttering on the summit. The morning sun sparkled on the equipage, its newness being made all the more noticeable by the ragged old arch behind.
She bowed to Somerset in a way which might have been meant to express that she had discovered her mistake; but there was no embarrassment in her manner, and the carriage bore her away without her making any sign for checking it. He had not been walking towards the castle entrance, and she could not be supposed to know that it was his intention to enter that day.