CHAPTER L
THE CRUMBLES

Nature's punishments of her erring children are slow as they are sure.

If the inexorable Dame cannot forget, neither can she hurry.

Therefore the shock of realization that the wages of sin are death—as our fathers used to put it; or that weakness brings its own reward—as we should more prosaically say; because it comes gradually to the human consciousness, is mercifully numbed.

It was some time before Ruth faced the fact that she was in the toils, and that there was no escaping. When at length the dreadful dream had become a reality, and she was forced to acknowledge to herself the life she bore within her, it seemed to her for a moment that the worst was passed.

On the morrow of the night on which the hidden voice refused longer to be hushed, she went away by herself on to the Crumbles: that bird-haunted waste of stagnant pools and tussocky shingles which stretches along the edge of the Bay to Pevensey. There at least she would be sure of being alone save for a rare creature of the Wilderness, snipe or wild duck, hare or slow-winged heron. Half a mile from the great Hotel, rising sepulchre-wise from the surrounding desolation, her back to the town, and her face to the sea, she sat down on the lonely beach and girdled her knees with her arms.

It was a dull November afternoon.

The remorseless sea crawled like a serpent out of the gloom, curled an ugly lip at her as it reared to stare, then softly falling to the ground, scudded towards her with a hideous little hiss, to suck her down, the victim of its lust.

The dumb sky offered her no help. There was neither song nor sun. And back in the West, amassed under significant gloom, lay the great camp of men, hostile now to her and hers, to which she must yet return.

Sitting thus by the scolding sea, her chin on her knees, she looked the situation in the sombre eyes.

It was terrible enough.

She had to pay the price every mothering woman must pay—disfigurement, pain, dependency, long-drawn physical disease, and, at the end of all, torment and possibly death: and in her case, added to the price Nature asks of those women who obey her laws, there was the penalty Man demands of those who violate his.

For her, and such as her, there is in Society, as at present organized, but one sure way of escape: and that way Ruth was too near to Nature, too healthy in mind and body, to contemplate save for a passing moment.

Her eyes travelled down her young figure, shapely yet.

"All right, my darling," she cooed. "You shan't suffer—not if it were ever so."

Her face was to the future. At whatever cost, she would be true to the trust imposed on her unsought.

Indeed, so sane was she and strong, that but for the old couple in the little yellow-washed cottage in the valley of the Ruther, who had taught Bible-class there for thirty years, she believed her fear would have been blotted out by the hope her baby, pushing through the crust of her terror like a crocus through the chill wintry earth into February sunshine, brought her.

For she recognized with a sob of bitterness that these brooding months, when her child, thrusting with tiny hands and inarticulate cries, was opening for her the Door of Escape into the Open Country that lies for each one of us outside the Prison that is Self, would have been the most beautiful in her life, if Humanity had blessed her for the sufferings she was enduring on its behalf, if Society had supported and pitied her when she had fallen into the trap that it had laid.

As things were, she was an outlaw, who would be stoned alike by men and women when it was discovered that an innocent indiscretion, prompted by a noble natural impulse, had flung her into the miry pit.

She turned and looked across the flats at her back to the great camp of men, crouching for their prey.

The Downs behind seemed to circle it as with a wall of dulled steel, making escape impossible; while over in the West was a murky glow as of damped-down furnaces, waiting to open their doors and pour down molten gloom on the City of the Plain.

Ruth rose up swiftly and returned to the Hotel.

Better even its unsympathetic walls than the naked desolation of the waste.

There, however, was no one to whom she could turn. Ernie was out of the question, while Madame had retired, as always at this season of the year, to the sister-hotel at Brussels.

Indeed in all Beachbourne with its hundred thousand inhabitants, its temples and tabernacles at every street corner, its innumerable white-collared priests and ministers, its sacrament-taking women, and reform-talking men, was there one soul to whom she could look in her distress?

Ruth prayed as she had never prayed before. Alone in the darkness on her knees, redeeming herself and mankind by her tears, she asked that the punishment for the mother's sin might not fall upon the child.

"On my head, O Lord, not hers," was the cry of her anguished heart.

Light came to her darkness.

There was one man in Beachbourne in whom she had detected, so she believed, the spirit of Love.

That man was Mr. Trupp, who had attended her Miss Caryll till she died.

Taking her courage in her hands one dark January evening, when she realized that her time at the Hotel was short, she stood on the steps of the Manor-house and rang.

"Why, you're quite a stranger, Ruth!" said the smiling maid.

"Could I see Mr. Trupp?" asked the girl.

"That I'm sure you can."

She was shown into the long consulting-room, and sat down, trembling, her eyes upon her knees.

She was staking her all upon a throw.

Mr. Trupp came in.

The young woman dressed in black, simply as a lady, rose.

"Who is it?" asked the surgeon, peering over his pince-nez.

"Ruth Boam, sir," the other answered. "Miss Caryll."

Mr. Trupp glanced at her. Then he put his hand upon her shoulder, and she knew that she was safe.

"Sit down," he said gently.

This large young creature, who had something of his own Bess about her, went straight to his heart in her trouble.

"Ruth," he said gravely. "May I send Mrs. Trupp to you?"

Ruth sobbed and nodded.

Very slowly Mr. Trupp climbed the stairs to his wife's room.

It was some time before Mrs. Trupp joined the girl.

The room was dark, save for one shaded lamp.

The lady came in quietly, dressed for the evening in a damson-coloured tea-gown that showed off her gracious beauty and silver hair. Her face was wan and wistful, her bearing noble and full of tender dignity.

The black figure on the chair did not move.

The elder woman took her seat beside the younger and laid her hand upon the girl's.

"Ruth," she said at last, in a still voice with a quiver running through it. "I know more than you think. You loved him, didn't you?"

The broken girl nodded; then shook her head.

"It's not that," she said. "It's not him. It's my baby. I couldn't abear she should be born in the Workhouse along of them."

To Mrs. Trupp the Workhouse system had been a nightmare ever since, as a young girl, she had first realized its existence and become dimly aware of the part it played in our imperial scheme. She believed that the institution which had its local seat in the old Cavalry Barracks at the back of Rectory Walk was no worse than others of its kind up and down the country. Sometimes she visited its wards and nurseries with her old friend, Edward Caspar, and came away sick at heart and oppressed of spirit. More often, sitting in her garden, she listened to his quietly told stories of what he always called "our Cess-pool."

Mrs. Trupp stroked Ruth's hand.

"It shan't," she said, with the fierceness that sometimes surprised her friends. "You must trust us. Mr. Trupp'll see you through. But you must leave the Hotel at once. I'm going to send you to a house of mine in Sea-gate—now. I shall telephone for the car."

And half an hour later Ruth was sitting in the chocolate-bodied car that once before had carried her into the perilous Unknown.

CHAPTER LI
EVELYN TRUPP

Evelyn Moray had been brought up in the Church; and, like most Englishwomen of her class and generation, she had as a girl looked to the Church to enable her to realize her ideals.

In her young days she and her neighbour of later life, Edward Caspar, had been of the little group of West-end people who had been drawn East by the couple who were making St. Jude's, Whitechapel, the home of real religion for more than the dwellers in the East-end. She would sometimes give a violin solo at the famous Worship Hour in the church off Commercial Street; while Edward Caspar would on rare occasions read Browning or Wordsworth there. The memory of those early days of dawning hopes served as a never-present bond between the pair when in later years chance caused them to pass their lives side by side in the little town on the hill under Beau-nez. And the religious development of each had followed much the same lines.

They had watched the fingers of love light a candle in the darkness of the late seventies and the early eighties, and ...

"The candle went out," Edward Caspar would say. "Candles always do in the Church of England."

"Yet the light grows," his companion would answer.

"Assuredly," Edward would agree. "Everywhere but in the Churches."

Evelyn Moray's disillusionment had begun even before her marriage. For all her innocence she brought a singularly shrewd judgment to bear on the affairs of men. And if as she came to understand the truth, she suffered at first the pangs of betrayed love, she was too brave a spirit not to face the situation in its entirety. The noble words of the Order of Baptism—manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, and the Devil—applied, she found, to a Church the outstanding characteristic of which was that it never fought at all. When she was bogged in a quagmire of doubt and despair, fearful of the new, more than dissatisfied by the old, Mr. Trupp had come into her life. His sane judgment, his wide experience, and broad philosophy, landed her once more on terra firma. In a time before the great Exodus from the Temples of Orthodoxy had assumed the proportions that we know to-day, she had left their gloomy portals to seek elsewhere that simple and direct service of mankind her spirit needed for its fulfilment.

Her father's death left her something of an heiress.

Forthwith she started a maternity home in a quiet street in Sea-gate for young women of the middle-class who had fallen victims of a Society which failed to protect them, to give them opportunity, to supply their honest needs.

The conditions of entry to the home were strict; and Mrs. Trupp never wilfully departed from them. Sometimes, it is true, she was taken in; often she was disappointed; but she persevered with the tenacity that is the inevitable outcome of continuous prayer.

She ran her home very quietly; and Mr. Trupp was, of course, her medical officer. But the Church, jealous of all trespassing within what it believed to be its own demesne, heard and objected.

"Making sin easy," said Lady Augusta Willcocks, who wore short hair and cultivated the downright manner which she believed to be characteristic of the English aristocracy.

She cherished a secret antipathy for "the doctor's wife," as in her more bitter moments she would describe her neighbour.

Lady Augusta was indeed of the world of Victoria and Disraeli, opulent, pushing, loud; Mrs. Trupp of an older, finer, more deliberate age. There was between the temper and tradition of the two ladies a gulf no convention could bridge. Lady Augusta felt and resented the fact.

Archdeacon Willcocks, on the other hand, reacted to the same stimulus in a different way. For him the fact that Mrs. Trupp was a Moray of Pole was paramount. And so—when Mr. Trupp had become famous—he hushed up his wife and schemed to run Mrs. Trupp's home in connection with the Diocesan Magdalen League.

But Mrs. Trupp was not to be cajoled. She had her own way of doing things, and meant to stick to it.

"I think perhaps we'd better go on working for the same end in our rather different ways," she told the Archdeacon with that disarming courtesy of hers.

"Am I to understand that our way is not the Christian way?" asked the Archdeacon, smiling and satirical according to his wont, as he swayed his long thin body to and fro, serpent-wise.

"It may be," replied the lady, faintly ironical in her turn. "It's not quite mine."

"Pity," said the Archdeacon, mounting his favourite high horse with the little toss of his head, carefully cultivated, which so impressed the shop-keepers of Old Town. "I had hoped that you remained of the Faith, even if you have seen good to desert your Church."

The lady looked at him with eyes that were a little wistful, a little whimsical.

"I'm afraid we're mutually disappointed," she answered quietly.

CHAPTER LII
THE RETURN OF THE OUTCAST

It was in Mrs. Trupp's home, in a back-water of the East-end, that Ruth's child was born.

The babe was beautiful, but over the mother a shadow lay.

"It's her people," Mr. Trupp told his wife. "She hasn't broken it to them yet."

"I know," Mrs. Trupp answered. "I must talk to her about it."

Ruth, curled in her bed, giving satisfaction to the babe in the hollow of her arm, showed every sign of distress when the other broached the topic.

"Will you trust me to tell them?" asked the lady gently. Ruth raised her fine eyes, brimming with gratitude to the elder woman's face.

Mrs. Trupp went.

Before she started on her pilgrimage of love she passed an hour in the parish-church, which was her favourite resort in all the crises of her life.

There the Archdeacon came on her, to his surprise.

"I'm glad to see you here, Mrs. Trupp," he said with slight inevitable patronage.

"I'm often here," she answered, smiling.

"Ah," said the Archdeacon. "I've missed you."

She could not tell him that this was because she avoided the church when he and his fellow-priests were ministering there.

"I love the atmosphere," she said.

"Thank-you. It is nice, I think," he answered with a little bow; taking to himself, with childish ingenuousness, the credit for the conditions that six centuries of prayer and worship had created.

An hour later Mrs. Trupp was face to face with Ruth's mother in the kitchen of Frogs' Hall.

Hard by, the church-bell tolled for evening service. Through the open window came the noise of homing rooks drifting up the valley from the Haven; and under the hedge on the far side the Brooks a cow bellowed.

It was Mrs. Boam who began.

"I allow you've come to tell me about our Ruth," she said at last.

"Have you heard anything?" asked Mrs. Trupp.

The other shook her head.

"We'd be the last to hear," she said. "That's sure. But I knaw there's been something. It's seven month since she's been anigh us. That's not our maid—our Ruth: so good and kind and considerate for her dad and me as she's always been."

"There has been something," answered Mrs. Trupp, and told her tale....

The mother listened in silence, the tears streaming down her face, her hands upon her lap.

When the story was finished, she rose.

"Thank you kindly, 'm," she said. "If you'll excuse me I'll tell dad. He's in the back."

She went out, a big unwieldy woman, walking with the unconscious majesty of grief, and was absent some time.

Mrs. Trupp sat in the kitchen with a somnolent rust-coloured cat, and listened to the willows rustling by the stream and the voices of children playing by the bridge.

Once she went to the window and looked across the cattle-dotted Brooks to the long low foothill that raises a back like a bow, green now with young corn, against the bleak shaven flanks of old Wind-hover.

Then Reuben Boam entered, erect as a soldier, and with the face of a puritan and prophet.

Mrs. Trupp wondered, as she often had of late years, why the men of her own class never attained the dignity of the great amongst the simple poor.

She rose humiliated, conscious of her own spiritual inferiority; and took his rough paw between her two delicate hands.

"Won't you sit down, Boam?" she suggested, quite modern enough to realize what a topsy-turvy world it was in which she should have to make such a request to an old man in his own home.

His long bare upper lip trembled and nibbled as he spoke.

"She's a good maid," he said huskily—"our Ruth. The Mistus says it were a gentleman. It's hard for a working girl to stand up agen a gentleman that's set on despoilin her. But in my day gentlemen were gentlemen and kept emselves accardin. They tell me it's different now. Accounts for the bit o bitterness, hap." The great hand lying in hers twitched. "She must come back home soon so ever she can move. There's not much. But we'll make out somehow. Rebecca must goo to her. She'll need her mother now. They was always very close—mother and daughter."

The old woman entered, tying her bonnet-strings beneath her chin.

"Yes, I'll take carrier's cart to Ratton. Then I can walk to the Decoy and take train to the East-end."

"Won't you come with me?" said Mrs. Trupp. "I've got the car in the Tye." ...

She dropped her companion at the door of the house in Sea-gate, and herself took a tram home. When Mrs. Boam emerged from the house an hour later a car was still at the door.

The old lady looked about her, a little bustled.

"Could you tell me the way to the tram?" she asked the chauffeur.

He touched his hat and smiled.

If Alf had a soft spot in his heart, it was for old women.

"This is your tram, ma," he said, and helped her in.

A fortnight later the same car stood at the same door, when Ruth emerged, her baby in her arms.

It was dusk, and she did not see the chauffeur, who leaned out towards her.

"Would you come up in front alongside me?" he said. "I put your box inside."

Ruth obeyed.

They drove through the gathering shadows in the sweet-scented June evening, past Ratton and Polefax, all along the foot of the Downs, the Wilmington Giant with his great staff gleaming wan and ogre-like on the hillside, and at the Turn-pike, just where the spire of B'rick church is seen pricking out of trees, turned for the gap and ran down the valley towards the Haven.

A sea-wind with a sparkle in it blowing up the Brooks seemed to meet the softer breezes of the Weald and penetrate them. A young moon hung over the sharp crest of Wind-hover.

Ruth, her baby in her arms, picked up familiar objects as they swung by: the long-backed barn on the left, the little red pillar-box on the wall, and occasionally the glimmer of a light in one of the homesteads among trees across the stream. On her right, unhedged cornlands swept away in a rustling sea towards the foot of the Downs which made a bulwark of darkness against the firmament; while on the near rise a row of stacks, like immense bee-hives, stood sentinel under the stars.

The car slid down a hill and up again. The valley lay naked alongside them now, cattle moving darkly in the moonlight and the tower of the church upon the hill black against the night in front.

The chauffeur took out his clutch. The car was running so noiselessly that Ruth could hear the ghostly stir and murmur of the willows that line the river-bank and cover the feet of the village with a green girdle.

"You don't remember me then?" said the man beside her.

They were the first words he had spoken.

Ruth glanced at the face beside her own, smooth and smiling in the moon, and clutched her baby to her so fiercely that it gave a little cry.

"Ah," said Alf, "I thought you would then."

The impression he had made seemed to please and satisfy him. He put his engine into gear, and was soon running through the village-street.

At the foot of the hill, where a group of mighty elms on a high bank guard the seaward entrance to the village, he turned sharply to the left under a row of pollarded poplars, and bumped over Parson's Tye quiet in the moonlight, the church four-square among its trees upon the mound on the right.

Then he drew up by the stile leading into the Brooks.

Ruth descended swiftly, and her babe lying like a snowdrift in her arms, disappeared in the darkness through the stile.

Alf waited beside his car, watching the river like a snake crawling and curling away in gleams of sudden silver under stark trees into the night.

A few minutes later the bulk of a big woman in a white apron appeared at the stile.

"Could you take the box in?" said a gentle voice. "Dad's crippled."

Alf swaggered.

"Very well. This once. To oblige."

The job accomplished, he looked round the little plain kitchen with a proprietary air.

"Nice little place," he said.

"Would you take a cup of tea?" asked Mrs. Boam.

Ruth had disappeared.

"No'w, thank you," said Alf in his cockiest manner. "I dare say you'll see me round here again next time I'm this way."

CHAPTER LIII
THE FIND

It was rather more than a year later.

Ernie, in grimy overall strapped over his waistcoat, and grey shirt without a tie, was climbing the lower slopes of High-'nd-Over from Sea-foord in an empty lorry.

Beneath him lay the Haven, buttressed by a gleam of white cliff, the Old River blue-winding to the sea at Exeat, and the New laid like a sword-blade across the curves of the Old.

The lorry bumped over the crest of the hill, austere and bare even in the sunshine, the sea broad-shining at its back, and dropped down out of the brilliant bleakness into the best wooded of the river-valleys that pierce the South Downs.

It was Saturday evening early in July.

There had been a fierce and prolonged drought. In the Brooks all along the banks of the slug-like stream the hay had already been carried fine in quality and light in weight. On the sun-burnt foothills a belated farmer was working overtime to carry the last load before Sunday. The long blue wain proceeded in lurches across the hill-side to the guttural exhortations of the wagoner, all about it a little busy knot of men and women raking and pitching.

Ernie sat with his back to the hill, his arms folded, looking across the valley to the tiny hamlets clustered round a spire, the huge black barns and clumps of wood beyond the stream, and the deep hedges running caterpillar-wise up the flank of the opposing Down.

The air was still keen and sparkling, yet full of scents rising from the fields that looked save in the Brooks brown for once and parched instead of fresh and green as of wont after being shorn of their crop.

Ernie enjoyed those scents. There was nothing like them in the East, he remembered. Was there indeed anywhere outside of England?

The lorry ran past the Dower-house in its rich old garden, the grey-shingled spire of the church opening to view at the back of the village across Parson's Tye.

They rattled under the elms at the foot of the hill and up the steep street, where the same brown spaniel lay always in the same place asking to be run over.

A jumble of houses pressed in upon them. Sudden dormer-windows peeped from unexpected roofs. Chimney-stacks would have tumbled on them but for the brilliant creeper that bound their old bricks together. While in odd corners behind the high brick path tall hollyhocks bowed as they passed.

The High Street was fuller than usual. Labourers slouched along it, tired and contented. A wain, with a pole at each corner pointing to heaven, the carter with patched corduroys and long whip plodding at the head of his team, was carrying a party of haymakers home. Under the great chestnut in the market-square a group of dusty horses stood, the sweat drying on them. Wages had been paid—the best wages of the year too: for all had worked overtime; Sunday was ahead of man and woman and beast alike; the most strenuous weeks of the year were over, and the most quiet to come.

The lorry ran swiftly down the hill, out of the village.

At the spot where a lane runs off to Littlington, it swerved suddenly to the right. Ernie, sitting on the rail, swayed over the side to look.

They were passing a girl, walking soberly along, her back to the village. Clearly she had just come from the fields, for she wore an orange-coloured turban wisped about her black hair, a long loose earth-coloured gabardine, stained with toil, and short enough to disclose the heavy boots of the agricultural worker.

She was a big young woman, broad of shoulder, large of limb, who walked in spite of her heavy foot-wear with an easy rhythm that caused Ernie's heart to leap.

The lorry flashed by.

The girl did not look up, marching steadfastly forward, careless of the passing vehicle; but Ernie caught a glimpse of her profile.

In a moment he was on his feet.

The lorry was travelling fast. Ernie tapped at the partition which divided the body of the car from the driver, and peered through the glass.

The man at the wheel heard, but shook a grim head. He did not mean to stop. Home and beer and the week-end rest lay before him.

Ernie, far too impetuous to think, did not hesitate.

He jumped at the road, fleeting swiftly away beneath him.

It rose up like a careering wave and struck him viciously.

Whether he fell on his feet, his hands and knees, or his back, he never afterwards knew.

That he was shocked into unconsciousness is clear, and that his body continued its ordinary functions unconcerned and guided he knew not by what mysterious power.

He woke, as it were, still jarred from shock, and aching throughout him, to find himself steadily tramping along a road.

The objective world surged in on him. He put up his hand to ward off the huge green seas that came lolloping along to overwhelm him.

Riding the charging billows were a host of immense black ogres, dreadful in their impassivity, and with blind eyes, who yet had seen him and were set on his destruction.

Then he resumed himself. The billows were the hills; the careering ogres the row of bee-hive stacks dumped peacefully on the rise upon his right.

He could not have been unconscious many minutes, for the sun still hung on the crest of the hill much where he had seen it last; but he was walking along the road on which he had fallen and must so have walked during his unconsciousness, seeing that he was now perhaps a quarter of a mile from the spot where he had jumped, and proceeding in the opposite direction to that in which the lorry had been travelling. His face was towards the sea and the village through which he had recently passed, his back to the Weald.

On his left was a wood, darkened by firs. A dusty motor-bicycle lay up against the bank.

Ernie was aware of the machine, as one is aware of something in a book. It was not real to him: he was not real to himself. Indeed he was conscious of one thing only: that some power was guiding him and bidding him keep quiet.

He did not attempt to take control. His brain, except as a mirror which reflected passing objects, was passive; and he was content that this should be so.

Dimly he wondered if he was dead. Then he realized that the question had no interest for him, and he retired once more into the No Man's Land of the hypnoidal state.

A villager was approaching.

He saw the man marching towards him as on the screen of a cinema.

The man said good evening.

Ernie answered, and found himself listening with interest to his own voice. It sounded so loud and alien.

He was a puppet in a play, watching his own performance—actor and audience in one.

Except for a certain diffused physical discomfort on the remote circumference of his being, he was not happy or unhappy. He was a headache, and that was all he was. But he was a headache which could walk and if necessary talk.

Then, still obeying his unseen guide, he turned off the dusty road into the wood upon his left that stretched across the Brooks down towards the stream.

On the fringe of the wood he was bidden to stay....

The river ran in front of him a few yards away. On the other bank, immediately opposite him, was a clump of willows. There too was a big young woman in a tan overall.

She was sitting on the tow-path, her back against a tree, her arms bound about her knees, her feet in heavy boots pressed close together in an attitude expressing doggedness. She was bare-headed; and her orange turban lay at her feet. Ernie marked her gypsy colouring, red and gold, and the yellow necklace that bound her throat. The sullen expression of her face was enhanced by the gleam of teeth which her lips, drawn back almost to a snarl, revealed.

Here surely was a tigress, trapped and resentful.

Above her stood a little man in the shining black gaiters and great goggles of a chauffeur.

He was talking and smiling. The young woman sat beneath him, her tense arms binding her knees, her eyes down.

But this was not the usual drama when the Serpent and the Woman meet. Here the Serpent was taunting Eve, not tempting her. So much her face betrayed.

Ernie watched the picture-play with absorbed interest. A great while ago he had known both actor and actress intimately, and still took an impersonal interest in them and their doings.

Then the little man's voice came to him across the stream, sharp and strident. He had a peculiar swaggering motion of the head and shoulders as he spoke, truculent yet furtive, that Ernie knew well; and all the time his eyes were wandering uneasily about the Brooks, searching for enemies.

"You'll ask me to marry you next!" he sneered. "ME marry YOU!"

The young woman rose, ominous and passionate. She stood in her tan-coloured gabardine, like some noble barbarian at bay, a creature of the earth and elements, yet conquering them.

She seemed to tower above the little man, and in her hand was the orange turban like a sling that swung heavily to and fro.

Ernie watched the scene with fascinated eyes, and, most of all, that bright slow-swinging thing that sagged so dreadfully.

The little man watched its pendulum-like action too. He did not seem to like the curious slow swing of it, or the look upon the face of the swinger, for he withdrew a pace or two.

"Any more of it," said the girl, her voice deep and vibrating, "and I'll tell Mr. Trupp."

The name struck Ernie's subconsciousness with the disturbing effect of a pebble dropped into a still pool. Ripples spread over the torpid surface of his mind, rousing it in ever-growing circles to life. The view was dissolving with extraordinary speed. It remained the same and yet was entirely changed. The play was becoming real....

The little man was now walking swiftly away along the tow-path. Suddenly he turned and came back a pace or two, his hand out.

The woman had not stirred. She stood bare-headed on the river-bank, one foot on a twisted root, one knee bent.

"Give me back my letter," said the man. "And I'll let it go at that."

She met him squarely.

"That I wun't then!"

The little man hesitated and then turned about.

Ernie came to himself with a pop, as a man comes to the surface after long submersion in the deeps.

CHAPTER LIV
THE BROOKS

Ruth was standing on the bank opposite him, but she had turned her back upon him and the river.

He saw the heave of her shoulders, and the motion of her head, and knew that she was weeping.

In a second he had flung himself into the water and was wading towards her.

She turned at the sound of his surging, expecting fresh enemies, and prepared for them.

He stood in mid-stream, a picturesque and dishevelled figure, grimy with coal-dust, collarless, touzle-headed, his greasy overall braced above his waistcoat.

"Ruth!" he called uncertainly.

She stood on the bank among the willows and looked down on him.

He ducked his face in the stream, and washed away the coal-dust.

"Now d'ye know me?" he grinned.

Her face glowed.

"I knew you without that, Ernie," she answered, her voice deep and humming, as of old, like an inspired silver-top.

He surged towards her with wide arms amid the water-weeds.

She stretched out a strong hand to help him up.

He took it, and kissed the fine fingers.

In another moment he was standing at her side.

"O, Ernie!" she said, and passed her hand across her forehead. "Seems like you was sent."

He gathered her in his arms. Her eyes were closed; her face, wan now beneath the warm colouring, tilted back. He marked the perfect round, full and very large, of her sheathed pupils. Then in her ear he whispered,

"Ruth, will you marry me?"

She shook her head, the tears welling from under closed lids. Then she withdrew quietly from his arms.

"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said.

He absorbed her with his eyes. Her gabardine, smocked at the breast, shewed the noble lines of her bosom, fuller and firmer than of old. It was open at the neck and revealed the amber necklace bound about a throat that was round and massive as a pillar, and touched to olive by the sun.

Alf was walking away towards the bridge which threw a red-brick span across the stream some hundreds of yards distant. Cows moved in the meadow. One came towards him along the tow-path, lowing in the dusk.

Alf stopped and watched it. He did not like cows: he did not like animals. "Machines are my line," he would say. "More sense in em." The cow, unaware of the disturbance she was causing in the other's breast, mooned forward. That was enough for Alf. On his right was a plank-bridge carelessly flung across the stream. Alf did not like plank-bridges either, but he preferred them to cows. And placed as he now was between the Devil and the Deep Sea, he chose the Deep Sea without a moment's hesitation, because he knew that here at least the Sea was fairly shallow.

He crossed the plank-bridge—on his hands and knees. The pair under the willow watched in silence with an awed curiosity.

"He's frit," murmured Ruth, the light and laughter peeping through her clouds.

"He's always frit, Alf is," Ernie answered out of the experience of thirty years.

"Alfs always is," commented Ruth.

Alf, the astounding, the perils of land and sea behind him, now rose from his humiliating position, and well knowing he had been watched, waved with the stupid bravado that is a form of self-defence towards the willow clump.

Then he disappeared into the wood. In another moment the swift thud-thud-thud of a motor-bike starting up was heard.

Ruth listened.

"He ain't coming back," said Ern comfortably.

"Ah," Ruth answered, unconvinced. "You don't know him. You don't know Alfs." She put out her hand towards him in that brave and gracious way of hers. "I'm glad you come though, Ern," she said.

Ernie's eyes filled with tears, as he caught her fingers.

"There!" he said. "He couldn't hurt you. He ain't no account, Alf ain't."

She answered soberly.

"No, he couldn't hurt me—not my body leastways. But I was like to ha killed him."

A little breeze stirred the willows. The turban on the ground flapped and fluttered like a winged bird. Then it opened suddenly and discovered a jagged flint, wrapped in its folds. Ruth took it out and tossed it into the stream.

"It aren't pretty, I knaw," she said. "But life is life; and Alfs are Alfs; and you never knaw."

He escorted her across the Brooks to the road, moving leisurely behind her in the dusk, his shoulder mumbling hers.

On the bridge she said good-bye.

He was outraged.

"I'm going home with you!" he cried.

"I'd liefer not, if you please, Ernie," she said, gently insistent. "Not through the village, Sadaday night and all."

"Very well," he answered reluctantly. "To-morrow then. A bit afoor cock-crow."