The day after the wedding Dacre decided to depart in rather indecent haste. The situation was too much for him.

All the morning he had been receiving a succession of small shocks, but some time after lunch he experienced an awful one. He caught his mother’s eyes fixed on him with such a dumb yearning as would have upset a rhinoceros, not to say Dacre, and he could have sworn to two tears that gathered in them and were as suddenly dried up. He blushed furiously and fled, in a terrible access of shyness, to the Rectory, where he astonished Mrs. Fellowes by the heat of his countenance and his greedy consumption of tea.

“Good gracious!” she thought, “is he in love—Dacre?”

She took up her cup, and gulping down her tea in rather an hysterical way, she watched him over the edge of it.

“The colour, and the stutter, and that awful thirst, they are all deadly symptoms. On the contrary, the amount of cake he swallows goes against it. What can it be anyway? Mercy! Can’t he hurry? I feel worn out between them all.”

Presently Dacre recovered a little and began to talk in a desultory way, saying a vast number of things he didn’t want to say, but on the whole lucidly enough.

Mrs. Fellowes pricked up her ears and grew keen all over, she got for her pains little direct information but, with a previous experience of the family, enough to go on.

“Worse than lovers!” she thought ruefully, “poor little woman! All the same, I am not the least surprised he wants to clear—he ought to stay though!”

“Dacre, your mother will miss Gwen more than any of us think, you have no idea how upsetting a wedding is, you might come in very useful just now. Won’t the regiment survive if you stay down for a few days?”

Dacre wriggled on his seat.

“Mrs. Fellowes, I have to go back, it is absolutely imperative.”

She laughed. “So it seems by the look of you!”

“Look at that big fellow!” she thought, “who fears neither man, death, nor devil, nor God much to speak of, routed by one flash of feeling from an unexpected quarter. The creatures can’t stand the unexpected at all, they are intrinsically conventional! If that fool had a glimmer of sense in him, he would have given the poor little woman a hug, and have let her have a comfortable easy howl for once in her life. I suppose she is doing problems with the old fossil in the library instead.”

Dacre felt his size frightfully, and began to contrast it mentally with the Sevres cup in his hand. He set it down, and towering huge above Mrs. Fellowes, delivered himself of another solemn asseveration as to the impossibility of staying one day longer.

“My dear boy, I am quite convinced,” she said, “if you did, your country must infallibly burst up.”

“Mrs. Fellowes, that isn’t fair!”

“No more it is! Sit down, Dacre, I have to shout to make my voice reach you up there, and yours comes down on me like a thousand bricks. What do you want me to do?”

He gave a sigh of relief and settled down comfortably.

“I want you to go and see her, and—oh, you know best then what to do. Don’t you think—I don’t know, but perhaps if you were to take her out for a walk or something.—Oh, good-bye, Mrs. Fellowes, and thanks, thanks, most awfully!”

Mrs. Fellowes watched him swing along down the drive, then pull up with a jerk to speak to her husband who was coming up, then swing off again out of sight.

“Poor old Dacre! But why didn’t he kiss her, the fool? I suppose he wasn’t ‘game’.”

She put some fresh tea into the pot and set her kettle on the little spirit lamp to boil up.

“Has Dacre been making you a declaration of unlawful love?” said the Rector when he came in. “He had precisely that air.”

“Worse than that a thousand times. His mother looked like crying, and was on the point of breaking out into sudden and condign maternal affection. Dacre fled incontinently. He is going to make a precipitate retreat to his regiment, and he came to plant me in the breach. The longer one lives, the less one thinks of the courage of your sex.”

“Want of experience makes cowards of us all. You couldn’t expect the fellow to face the unknown!”

“That’s it, you are all tarred with the same brush, you must have brutal sight to steady your nerves. Now, we——”

“You! You, my love, have intuition. Besides, there is a quotation that might apply, ‘fools rush in—’”

“Do drink your tea, and don’t try to be funny, I feel awful.”

“I feel rather off myself, I have just been at the Park.”

“Oh, oh! What were they at?”

“Waring was lost in some new speculation, his wife was lost in a bad dream. I suppose this late awakening of her nature is good for her, but it seems cruel. It hurts one to see her suffer in that still, patient way of hers, and it will play the deuce with Waring’s way of life if it goes on. It wasn’t nature, of course, but that absolute oneness of their life was a beautiful thing to watch, and quite unique. I suppose I ought to be glad that it has received this check, but I’m not.”

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself for wanting to perpetuate such a life—have you forgotten Gwen’s face?”

“Shall I ever forget it, Ruth? But anything absolutely unusual in a sober married couple, and in a Midland parish on a clay soil, the carnal mind will cling to like any burr. Let us put the moralities aside for a moment and consider the subject with the pagan mind. What would outside life be to you or to me in these smug levels, except for that delicious pair of maniacs? We both know how stodgy undiluted duty grows, how one’s feet stick and stumble in it, faithfully as one tries to keep one’s eyes on the ‘everlasting hills’; how dreary and hopeless work often seems in scattered districts, with neither abject poverty nor active crime to fight against, to raise and keep alive in one the inspiring battle greed. But to be obliged to face a level life daily; to spend one’s soul in trying to raise sodden dough; to galvanize half-dead things, heavy, dull, sullen hearts, neither hot nor cold, desiring neither good nor evil, knowing neither tears nor laughter, but slogging on to the grave in dreadful patience! And, in spite of exceptions, this is the life of dozens of country parsons, only we hold our tongues about it, or else we hunt and fatten ourselves, or we have big families to blunt our feelings.”

“John, what’s wrong?” she said.

He stroked her hair softly.

“Nothing except myself, I suppose. You know I was at the Low Church Meeting yesterday, and the fellows tried me, some of them are so intense as regards food—that isn’t so indecent as haste, however. In the hurry to gobble his brown soup that he might have a go at the white, Lang nearly choked himself. Then it went against one to see how they swallowed syrupy port, one could feel the saccharine sediment on one’s tongue, it showed somehow a defective development. Then when gossip, chiefly concerning the gone-astray young women of the neighbourhood set in, they grew so keen on their subject, that three of them fairly spluttered. When this course was removed and religion brought on, one seemed to get a blow at every turn, the meat and the drink had got into our souls and it came out in our speech.

“It looks well for me, little woman, me, a middle-aged country parson, with a fat parish, and reputed sane; but I would give it all, and my eyes into the bargain, to be in the thick of the turmoil—I don’t care a rap where, London holds no talisman for me any more than any other big centre—where men teem and life lives, for it seems even better to live in pain than to doze in apathy. Ah! if only my brutal health would have stood it!”

“Poor John, how the old sore will break out!” she said tenderly, with a short, dry little sob, “and I too, I would give it all, and my eyes to boot, if I had just one little child.—And Mrs. Waring, up there in her fine house, would give it all if she could only grasp her lost motherhood. Two old sores and a new!

“After all,” she added, “when all’s said and done, we are no worse off than our neighbours. None of us, it seems to me, get any more than the rags and fragments of their hearts’ desires, and yet we all manage to make life jolly on them. We do, John,” she said, with a gay little laugh.—It was wonderful how she managed it with her heart quivering.—“Look in my face and say we do!”

He looked in her face, and he kissed her.