Every evening the three Furlongers used to sit by the fire and stare into it. Len would sprawl back in his chair with his pipe, and the other two lean forward with needlework and newspapers and cigarettes. They seldom spoke—the wind would howl, and the shadows would creep, and the night drift on through star-strewn silences. At last some one would yawn loudly, and the others laugh—and all go to bed.

Len was worried about Nigel and Janey, and usually devoted these evenings and their pipely inspiration to thinking them out in a blundering way. He was not a man given to problems, and hitherto life had held but few. It was an added bitterness that now his problem should be that brother and sister who had always stood to him for all that was simple and beloved.

Nigel, in his strange fears, his subcurrents of emotion, and quickly changing moods, reminded Len of a horse; he did not object to drawing upon his knowledge of horses and their ways for the management of his brother. He humoured him, bore with him, but kept at the same time a tight hand—especially when the boy's seething restiveness and pain found vent in harsh words to Janey. Janey could not bear harsh words now—she had used to be able to pick them off and throw them back in the true sisterly style, but now she winced and let them stick. Janey perplexed Len as much as Nigel, and worried him far more. Her eyes seemed to be growing very large, and her cheeks very hollow. When she smiled her lips twitched in a funny way, and when she laughed it grated. Janey cost Len many pipes.

The explanation of Janey was, of course, at Redpale Farm, sitting glumly by his winter fireside, just as she sat by hers. The love of Janet Furlonger and Quentin Lowe had entered on a new phase. Quentin was beginning to be dissatisfied. At first Janey had imagined that she would welcome this, but it did not come as she had expected. It brought their love into spasmodic silences. Up till then Quentin and she had always been writing and meeting, but now he wrote to her and met her in strange, sudden jerks of feeling. Sometimes he left her for days without even a line, but she could never doubt him, because when at last they met, his love seemed to burn with even greater torment and fierceness than in the months of its more regular expression. He began to give her presents, too—a locket, a ring, a book, which she shrank from, but forced herself to accept because of the evident delight he found in giving.

Once more he was rambling restlessly and ineffectively on a quest for independence. His efforts always came to nothing, partly through his own incapacity, but always, too, through a sheer perverseness of fate, thwarting developments, wrecking coincidences—so there really seemed truth in his cry that the stars fought against him.

She began to realise that, much as she had deplored what looked like his permanent satisfaction with a makeshift, she had found in it a kind of vicarious rest. When anxiety and disillusion lay like stones at the bottom of her heart, she had comforted herself with the thought of the lightness of his. Now she could do so no longer—she had the burden of his sorrow as well as her own to bear, and for a woman like Janey, this was bound much more than to double her load.

Her anxiety about Nigel was also a pain that bruised through the weeks. He was decidedly "queer," and she could not understand his new craze for fiddling to children. Sometimes, too, he would be terribly sentimental, and have fits of more or less maudlin affection for her and Leonard. At other times he would be surly, and during his attacks of surliness he would work with desperation, almost with greed, as if he longed to wear himself out. Then he would come in, and throw himself down in a chair, and sleep the sleep of utter exhaustion with wide-flung limbs—or he would have a bath by the fire, regardless of any cooking operations she might have on hand, or the difficulty of heating gallons of ice-cold water in a not over-large kettle. Len would be furious with him on these occasions, and tell him that if he wanted a Turkish bath built on to Sparrow Hall he had better say so at once.

"I hope we'll have a happy Christmas," remarked Janey rather plaintively to Len one evening late in December.

"Why shouldn't we?" he asked; he was kneeling on the hearthstone, cleaning her boots.

"Well, we've been counting on it so. You remember last Christmas, when I said that next time we'd have Nigel with us...."

"And we've got him, haven't we?"

"Yes."

She was silent then, and the next minute he lifted his eyes from the blacking and laughed up at her.

"There's the rub, Janey. We don't know how Nigel will take Christmas."

"No—he'll probably be frightfully sentimental at breakfast, and kiss us both—and then he'll have a boiling bath—and then he'll take his fiddle and go out for hours to play to those wretched kids."

"A pretty fair prophecy, I should think."

"He's just like a kid himself," sighed Janey.

"Yes—I think he's getting soft in that way. At any rate, he's taken an uncommon fancy to kids. By the bye, that girl he rescued at Grinstead station, Strife's girl, has come home for Christmas. I saw her out with her father this morning, and she'd got her hair up, and looked years older. I expect she'll be getting married soon. Her people will see that she settles down early—they don't want two like her sister."

"What was that?" cried Janey.

"What?"

"I thought I heard some one in the room."

"There's nobody—look, quite empty, except for you and me. You're getting nervy, old girl."

"Perhaps I am."

He stood up, and looked at her closely and rather anxiously. Then he put his arms round her.

"You're not well, sis—I've noticed it for a long time. I say—there's nothing the matter, is there? You'd tell us if there was, wouldn't you?"

"Of course ... there's nothing," she whispered, as his rough hand stroked her hair. He held her to him very tenderly, he was always gentler and less exacting with her than Nigel. Yet, somehow, when she was unhappy it was Nigel she wanted to cling to, whose strong arms she liked to feel round her, whose suffering face she wanted close to hers. She wanted Nigel now.

But Nigel had gone out.

He walked heavily, his arms folded over his chest, his head hanging.

So she was back—and she was grown up—and she would soon be married.

These three contingencies had never struck him before. She had gone so inevitably out of his life, that he had never troubled to consider her return to Shovelstrode. She had stood so inevitably for adolescence, unformed and free, that he had never thought of her growing up. And as for marriage, it had seemed a thing alien and incongruous, her girlhood had been virgin to his timidest desire.

But she was grown up. She was ready for marriage, and most likely would soon be married. He realised that to some other man would be given, probably readily enough, what he had not dared even think about. A shudder passed through him, but the next minute he flung up his head almost triumphantly. He had had from Tony what she would never give to another—he had had her free thoughtless comradeship, and she would never give it again. She was grown up now, and unconsciously she would realise her womanhood, put up little barriers, put on little airs. He—he alone—would have the memory of her heedless girlhood innocently displayed—he had what no other man had had, or could have ever.

Christmas came, a moist day, warm and rather hazy. Janey had decorated Sparrow Hall with holly and evergreens, and had even compounded an ominous-looking plum-pudding. She was desperately anxious that their first Christmas together for four years should be a success—she even ventured to hint the same to Nigel.

"Why," he drawled, "do we keep Christmas? Is it because Christ was born in a manger?"

"Of course not—how queerly you talk!"

"Because that was why we kept it in prison."

"But we aren't in prison here."

"Aren't we?—aren't we, Janey?—would there be any good keeping Christmas if we weren't?"

She laughed uneasily.

"Nigel, you're balmy. Come along and help me make mince-pies. It's all you're good for."

In spite of her fears, Christmas morning passed happily enough, and though the dinner was culinarily a failure, socially it was a huge success. The pudding, having triumphantly defeated the onslaughts of knives, forks and teeth, was accorded a hero's death in the kitchen fire, to the accompaniment of the Dead March on Nigel's fiddle, and various ritual acts extemporised by Len from memories both military and ecclesiastical. He was preparing a ceremonial funeral for the mince-pies, when he and Janey suddenly realised that Nigel had left the room.

"Now where the devil has he gone?"

Janey sighed.

"Some silly game of his. I hope he'll be back soon."

"Not he!—he's probably off for the day, to fiddle to those blasted kids, if they're not too full of plum-pudding to dance. By Christopher, Janey—he's mad."

The dark was gathering stealthily—crawling up from the Kent country in the east, burying the wet winter meadows of Surrey and Sussex in damp and dusk and fogs. In the west a crimson furnace smouldered, showing up a black outline of hills. Moisture was everywhere—the roads gleamed with mud, the banks were sticky with damp tangled grass, and drops quivered and glistened on the bare twigs of the hedges.

A great sense of disheartenment was everywhere. It was Christmas day, and hundreds of hearths were bright—but outside, away from humanity and its cheerful dreams, all Nature mourned, in the curse of the winter solstice, drowned in the water-flood. Furlonger had left his hearth with its cheery flames and loved faces and warm, sweet dreams of goodwill, and was out alone with Nature, who had no warmth nor love nor make-believe, only wet winds and winter desolation.

He came to Dormans Land. The blinds were down, and through the chinks he saw the leap and spurt of firelight. He stood where three roads met, and the wind swept up from Lingfield, where the first stars had hung their lanterns. He began to play—a dreary, springless tune, that struck cold into the hearts of the few it reached through their closed windows. He played the song of Christmas as Nature keeps it—the festival of life's drowning and despair.

No children came to dance. They were happy beside their parents, with sweets and crackers and fun. They were keeping Christmas as man keeps it, and drew down the blinds on Nature keeping it outside, and the lone fiddler who felt it more congenial to keep it with Nature than to keep it with men.

Nigel stopped playing and looked around him into the gloom. He felt disappointed because the children had not come to dance. He had broken away from his brother and sister because he wanted those dancing children so badly—and they had not come. Perhaps he had better go further up into the village, since the children were not playing in the street as usual, but in their homes.

So he went up, and stood between the church and the Royal Oak. The place seemed deserted—only a great, empty car stood outside the inn. Nigel began to play, but again there was no response. The darkness came fluttering towards him from the back streets of the village, and seemed to creep right into his heart.

Then suddenly it struck him that he played too doleful a tune for the children. They liked lively airs—they found it hard to dance to those bizarre mournful extempores of his. So he started "O Caro Nome," and when that had jigged and rippled to an end, he played airs from Flotow's Martha, and then his old favourite, "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls."

The street was still empty. From a cottage close by came the wheeze of a harmonium. He stood drearily snapping the strings with his fingers. Then suddenly he realised how ridiculous he was—playing in the village street, in the damp and the cold and the dark, when he ought to be at home, eating and drinking and singing and joking because Christ was born in a manger.

He turned away—he was a fool. Why did he like seeing children dance?—why did it hurt him so that they were better employed to-day? He did not know. His life, his emotions, his heart, were like the twilight, a dark and cheerless mystery. He could not understand half what he felt in his own breast. He was himself only a child dancing in the dusk, to an unknown fiddler playing a half-comprehended tune.

The next moment he heard the inn door open behind him, and turning round saw a short, broad figure on the doorstep, wrapped in an enormous motor-coat.

"Will you not play something else?"

The words came heavily, with a teutonic lumber. Nigel saw a round, florid face, and dark, very close-cropped hair.

He hesitated—perhaps the stranger was making game of him.

"I have been listening to you for some time, and now I have come to see you. I am surprised. I do not think you are a beggar."

"Not quite," said Nigel.

"Well, play some more."

Again Furlonger hesitated. Then he hoisted his fiddle to his shoulder with a short, rather grating, laugh.

He played the Requiem from Il Trovatore.

There was silence. The darkness seemed to pass in waves over the sky, each wave engulfing it deeper. The wind sobbed a strange little tune in the eaves of the inn.

"You have tortured my ears," said the stranger. Nigel flushed angrily—so after all the idea had been to make game of him—"with your damned Verdi."

"How do you mean?"

"You are too good to play Verdi."

"Oh!"

"What are your favourite composers?"

"Gounod—Verdi—Balfe——"

"Ai! Ai! Ach!" and the stranger put his hands over his ears.

Nigel was beginning to be faintly amused.

"Well, what's the matter with 'em?"

"The matter?—they are dead."

"That'll be the matter with us all, sooner or later."

"Let us hope it will be sooner for some of us."

Nigel looked into the stranger's face, and again experienced a slight shock of surprise. The eyes in the midst of its florid circumference were haunted with despair, grief-stricken and appealing. He suddenly realised that it was not normal for a man to spend Christmas day in lonely petrol prowlings.

"Play some more."

"I can only play Verdi and Balfe and those others."

"Well, I'll try to endure it."

"Look here," said Furlonger, "what's your game? Why should you want me to play when you hate my music?"

"I hate your music, but I like your playing. You are a wonderful player."

"Oh, rats!" and Nigel felt angry, he did not know why.

"I repeat—you are a wonderful player. Who taught you?"

"Carl Hauptmann."

"Hauptmann!—he was a pupil of mine."

"Then you're Eitel von Gleichroeder!"

"I am."

Nigel looked interested. Memories of his life in London revived—music lessons, concerts, musical jargon, a lost world in which he had once lived, but had now almost forgotten. He seemed to hear Hauptmann's strange, coughing laugh as he chid his pupil for what von Gleichroeder had just chidden him now—his abominable taste. "You are hobeless, hobeless—you and your Balfe and your Bellini and your odder vons." Von Gleichroeder he knew would take an even more serious view of the case, as he had a reputation for ultra-modernism in music. Hauptmann's contempt for Balfe and Bellini he carried on to Verdi and Gounod, even Tschaikowsky, while though he was obliged to grant Beethoven supremacy with a grudge, he passed over his works in favour of those of Scriabin, d'Indy, Debussy and Strauss.

"Well, well," said the musician, "play Zampa, play Lucia di Lammermoor, play La Somnambula—any abomination you please—but play."

Nigel, with rather an evil grin, played Zampa.

"Why do you like those things?"

"Because they are pretty tunes."

"Ach!—and why do you like pretty tunes?"

Nigel stared at him full of hostility, then his manner changed.

"Because they remind me of—of things I used to feel."

He realised dimly that there was a subtle free-masonry between him and this man. In a way it drew them together, in a way it held them apart.

"What you used to feel. So! that is better. It's your heart they tickle, not your ears."

Furlonger nodded.

"Do you play for your living?"

"No—I am a farmer."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I play for children to dance."

Von Gleichroeder looked round, and shrugged his shoulders. He did not seem particularly surprised.

"Would you not like to play for grown-up children to dance? For fashionable society to crowd to hear you, and gather round you like children round a barrel-organ?"

"Fashionable society won't waste much of its time on me. I've been in prison three years for bogus company promoting."

"So! But that is good. Without that attraction you could fill the Bechstein, but with it you can fill the Albert Hall."

"Gammon."

"Not at all. My dear young man, I see a glorious future ahead of you, if you will only trouble to secure it. Come to London and study music——"

"Please don't talk nonsense."

"It is not nonsense. You are wonderfully gifted. I don't say you are a genius, for you are not—but you are wonderfully gifted, and your history will make you interesting to the ladies. With your talent and your history and—and your face, you ought to do really well, if only some enterprising person would take you in hand."

"Which isn't likely."

"I beg your pardon—it is most likely. I will do it."

Nigel was more surprised than grateful.

"No, thank you."

"Do not be proud. It is purely a business offer. I expect to make money out of you, and—what do you call it?—credit. Listen here—if you cannot pay my fees, I will give you a year's tuition free of charge, on condition that I have a percentage on your salaries during the next five years. That is a generous offer—many a young man would give much to have me for professor."

Nigel shook his head.

"Thanks awfully—but I'm not keen on it."

"And why?"

"Well, for one thing, I don't want to make my stinking past into an advertisement, and for another I don't want to go back to prison."

"Prison!—that is a strange name for fame and big salaries."

"I'm not thinking of those so much as of what must come before them—all the grind and slavery. My music's the only part of me that has never been in prison, and if I make a trade and treadmill out of it, I shall be degrading it just as I have degraded everything else about me."

"It will not be degradation—on the contrary."

"And I don't believe I shall ever make myself a name."

"That remains to be seen. I don't expect you to become world-famous, but there is no reason why you should not be exceedingly successful in England, where no one bothers very much about taste or technique. Taste you have none, technique—— Lord help us!—but temperament—ach, temperament! You have suffered—hein?"

Nigel coloured. He could not answer—because he felt this man had suffered too.

"Of course, you have suffered—you could not play like that if you had not. Without your suffering you would be a clever amateur—just that. But now, because you have suffered, you are something more. 'Wer nie sein Brod mit ThrÄnen ass'—you doubtless know our Goethe's wonderful lines. So"—and his dark, restless eyes looked up almost imploringly to the sky—"sorrow has one use in this world."

There was another pause. The village was quite dark now—lights twinkled. High above the frosty exhalations of the dusk, piling walls of smoke-scented mist round the cottages, the stars shone like the lights of celestial villages, dotting the dark country of the sky. The Wain hung tilted in the north, lonely and ominous, Betelgeuse was bright above Sussex, Aldebaran burned luminous and lonely in his quarter. Nigel watched the Sign of Virgo, which had just risen, and glowed over the woods of Langerish. It flickered like candles in the wind. Then he dropped his eyes to the darkness round him, and through it came the creak of a harmonium.

"Well?" said von Gleichroeder.

"Well?"

"Will you accept my offer?"

"No, thank you."

"Why?"

"I've given you my reasons." The subtle sense of hostility put insolence into his voice.

"They are no reasons."

"They are mine."

The foreigner shrugged his shoulders.

"So be it. I have made my offer—you have refused it. It is your own concern."

He took out his card-case, and presented his card to Furlonger.

"In case you change your mind."

This was anti-climax, and Nigel felt irritated.

"I'm not in the habit of changing my mind."

"Just as you please," and von Gleichroeder put back the card-case in his pocket.

"Good evening," he added politely.

"Good evening," mumbled Furlonger.

He turned away, and walked down the village to where the foot-path to Wilderwick striped the fields. At the stile he paused, and realised that he had been exceptionally insolent.