Nance Herrick stood at her window in the Doorm dwelling the morning after their arrival thinking desperately of what she had done. The window, open at the top, let in a breath of chilly, salt-tasting wind which stirred the fair loose hair upon her forehead and cooled her throat and shoulders. At the sound of her sister’s voice she closed the window, cast one swift, troubled look at the river flowing so formidably near, and moved across to Linda’s side. Drowsy and warm after her deep sleep, the younger girl stretched out her long, youthful arms from the bed and clasped them round Nance’s neck.

“Are you glad,” she whispered, “are you glad, after all, that I made you come? I couldn’t have borne to be selfish, dear. I should have had no peace. No!—,” she interrupted an ejaculation from Nance, “—it wasn’t anything to do with Rachel. It wasn’t, Nancy darling, it really and truly wasn’t! I’m going to be perfectly good now. I’m going to be so good that you’ll hardly know me. Shall I tell you what I’m going to do? I’m going to learn the organ. Rachel says there’s a beautiful one in the church here, and Mr. Traherne—he’s the clergyman, you know—plays upon it himself. I’m going to persuade him to teach me. O! I shall be perfectly happy!”

Nance extricated herself from the young girl’s arms and, stepping back into the middle of the room, stood contemplating her in silence. The two sisters, thus contrasted, in the hard white light of that fen-land morning, would have charmed the super-subtle sense of some late Venetian painter. Nance herself, without being able precisely to define her feeling, felt that the mere physical difference between them was symbolic of something dangerously fatal in their conjunction. Her sister was not an opposite type. She too was fair—she too was tall and flexible—she too was emphatically feminine in her build—she even had eyes of the same vague grey colour. And yet, as Nance looked at her now, at her flushed excited cheeks, her light brown curls, her passionate neurotic attitude, and became at the same time conscious of her own cold pure limbs, white marble-like skin and heavily-hanging shining hair, she felt that they were so essentially different, even in their likeness, that the souls in their two bodies could never easily comprehend one another nor arrive at any point of real instinctive understanding.

Something of the same thought must have troubled Linda too at that moment, for as they fixed their eyes on each other’s faces there fell between them that sort of devastating silence which indicates the struggle of two human spirits, seeking in vain to break the eternal barrier in whose isolating power lies all the tragedy and all the interest of life.

Suddenly Nance moved to the window and threw it wide open.

“Listen!” she said.

The younger sister made a quick apprehensive movement and clasped her hands tightly together. Her eyes grew wide and her breast rose and fell.

“Listen!” Nance repeated.

A low, deep-drawn murmur, reiterated, and again reiterated, in menacing monotony, filled the room.

“The sea!” cried both sisters together.

Nance shivered, closed the window and sank down on a chair. With lowered eyes she remained for some seconds absorbed and abstracted. When she lifted her head she saw that her sister was watching her and that there was a look on her face such as she had never seen there before. It was a look she was destined to be unable to thrust from her memory, but no effort of hers could have described it then or afterwards. Making an effort of will which required all the strength of her soul, Nance rose to her feet and spoke solemnly and deliberately.

“Swear to me, Linda, that nothing I could have said or done would have made you agree to stay in London. I told you I was ready to stay, didn’t I, that night I came back with Adrian and found you awake? I begged and begged you to tell me the truth, to tell me whether Rachel was forcing you into going. I offered to leave her for good and all—didn’t I?—if she was unkind to you. It’s only the truth I want—only the truth! We’ll go back—now—to-morrow—the moment you say you wish it. But if you don’t wish it, make me know you don’t! Make me know it—here—in my heart!”

In her emotion, pressing her hand to her side, she swayed with a pathetic, unconscious movement. Linda continued to watch her, the same indescribable look upon her face.

“Will you swear that nothing I could have done would have made you stay? Will you swear that, Linda?”

The younger girl in answer to this appeal, leapt from her bed and rushing up to her sister hugged her tightly in her arms.

“You darling thing!” she cried, “of course I’ll swear it. Nothing—nothing—nothing! would have made me stay. Oh, you’ll soon see how happy I can be in Rodmoor—in dear lovely Rodmoor!”

A simultaneous outburst of weeping relieved at that moment the feelings of both of them, and they kissed one another passionately through their falling tears.

In the hush that followed—whether by reason of a change in the wind or simply because their senses had grown more receptive—they both clearly heard through the window that remained closed, the husky, long-drawn beat, reiterative, incessant, menacing, of the waves of the North Sea.

During breakfast and the hours which succeeded that meal, Nance was at once surprised and delighted by the excellent spirits of both Miss Doorm and Linda. They even left her to herself before half the morning was over and went off together, apparently in complete harmony along the banks of the tidal stream.

She herself, loitering in the deserted garden, felt a curious sensation of loneliness and a wonder, not amounting to a sense of discomfort but still remotely disturbing, as to why it was that Adrian had not, as he had promised, appeared to take her out. Acting at last on a sudden impulse, she ran into the house, put on her hat and cloak, and started rapidly down the road leading to the village.

The Spring was certainly not so far advanced in Rodmoor as it was in London. Nance felt as though some alien influence were at work here, reducing to enforced sterility the natural movements of living and growing things. The trees were stunted, the marigolds in the wet ditches pallid and tarnished. The leaves of the poplars, as they shook in the gusty wind, seemed to her like hundreds and hundreds of tiny dead hands—the hands of ghostly babies beseeching whatever power called them forth to give them more life or to return them to the shadows.

Yes, some alien influence was at work, and the Spring was ravished and tarnished even while yet in bud. It was as if by an eternal mandate, registered when this portion of the coast first assumed its form, the seasons had been somehow thwarted and perverted in the processes of their natural order, and the land left, a neutral, sterile, derelict thing, neither quite living nor quite dead, doomed to changeless monotony.

Nance was still some little distance from the village, but she slackened her pace and lingered now, in the hope that at any moment she might see Adrian approaching. She knew from Rachel’s description only very vaguely where Mr. Stork’s cottage was and she was afraid of missing her lover if she went too far.

The road she was following was divided from the river by some level water meadows and she did not feel certain whether the village itself lay on the right or the left of the river mouth. Miss Doorm had spoken of a bridge, but among the roofs and trees which she made out in front of her, she was unable at present to see anything of this.

What she did see was a vast expanse of interminable fen-land stretching away for miles and miles on every side of her, broken against the sky line, towards which she was advancing, by grey houses and grey poplars but otherwise losing itself in misty horizons which seemed infinite in their remoteness. On both sides of the little massed group of roofs and trees and what the girl made out as the masts of boats in the harbour, a long low bank of irregular sand-dunes kept the sea from her view, though the sound of the waves—and Nance fancied it came to her in a more friendly manner now she was closer to it—was insistent and clear.

Across the fens to her left she discerned what was evidently the village church but the building looked so desolate and isolated—alone there in the midst of the marshes—that she found it difficult to conceive the easily-daunted Linda as practising organ music in such a place. She wondered if the grey building she could just obscurely distinguish, leaning against the wall of the church, were the abode of Mr. Traherne. If so, she thought, he must indeed be a man of God to endure that solitude.

She had wandered into the wet grass by the road’s edge and was amusing herself by picking a bunch of dandelions, the only flower at that moment in sight, when she saw a man’s figure approaching her from the Rodmoor direction. At first she assumed it was Adrian, and made several quick steps to meet him, but when she recognised her mistake the disappointment made her so irritable that she threw her flowers away. Her irritation vanished, however, after a long survey of him, when the stranger actually drew near.

He was a middle-sized man wearing at the back of his head a dark soft hat and buttoned up, from throat to ankles, in a light-coloured heavy overcoat. His face, plump, smooth, and delicately oval, possessed a winning freshness of tint and outline which was further enhanced by the challenging friendliness of his whimsical smile and the softness of his hazel eyes. What could be seen of his mouth—for he wore a heavy moustache—was sensitive and sensuous, but something about the way he walked—a kind of humorous roll, Nance mentally defined it, of his sturdy figure—gave an impression that this body, so carefully over-coated against the cold, was one whose heart was large, mellow and warm. It was not till after a minute or two, not in fact till he had wavered and hovered at her side like an entomologist over a newly discovered butterfly, that the girl got upon the track of other interesting peculiarities.

His nose, she found, for instance, was the most striking feature of his face, being extremely long and pointed like the nose of a rodent, and with large quivering nostrils slightly reddened, it happened just then, by the impact of the wind, and tilted forward as the man veered about as though to snuff up the very perfume and essence of the fortunate occasion.

From the extreme tip of this interesting feature hung a pearly drop of rheum.

What—next to the man’s nose—struck the girl’s fancy and indeed so disarmed her dignity that even his entomological hoverings were forgiven, was the straight lock of black-brown hair which falling across his forehead gave him a deliciously ruffled and tumbled look, as if he had recently been engaged in a rural game of “blind man’s buff.” The forehead itself, or what could be seen of it, was weighty and thoughtful; the forehead of a scholar or a philosopher.

Nance had never in all her life been treated by a stranger quite in the way this worthy man treated her, for not only did he return upon his steps immediately after he had passed her, but he permitted his eyes, both in passing and repassing, to search her smilingly up and down from her boots to the top of her head, precisely as if he were a connoisseur in a gallery observing the “values” of a famous picture.

And yet, for she was not by any means oblivious to such distinctions, the girl was unable to feel even for one second that this surprising admirer was anything but a gentleman—a gentleman, however, with very singular manners. That she certainly did feel. And yet, she liked him, liked him before he uttered a word, liked him with that swift, irrational, magnetic attraction which, with women even more than with men, is the important thing.

Passing her for the third time he suddenly darted into the grass, and with a movement so comically impetuous that though she gave a start she could not feel angry, picked up her discarded flowers and gravely presented them to her, saying as he did so, “Perhaps you’ll be annoyed at leaving these behind—or do you wish them at the devil?”

Nance took them from him and smiled frankly into his face.

“I suppose I oughtn’t to have picked them,” she said. “People don’t like dandelions brought into houses.”

“What an Attic chin you have!” was the stranger’s next remark. There was such an absence in his tone of all rakish or conventional gallantry that the girl still felt she could not repulse him.

“You are staying here—in Rodmoor?” he went on.

Nance explained that she had come to live with Miss Doorm.

“Ah!” The stranger looked at her curiously, smiling with exquisite sweetness. “You have been here before,” he said. “You came in a coach, pulled by six black horses. You know every sort of reed and every kind of moss in all the fens. You know all the shells on the shore and all the seaweed in the sea.”

Nance was less puzzled than might be supposed by this fantastic address, as she had the advantage of interpreting it in the light of the humorous and reassuring smile which accompanied its utterance.

She brought him back to reality by a direct question. “Can you tell me where Mr. Stork lives, please? I’ve a friend staying with him and I want to know which way a person would naturally take coming from there to us. I had rather hoped,” she hesitated a little, “to have met my friend already. But perhaps Mr. Stork is a late riser.”

The stranger, who had been looking very intently at the opposite hedge while she asked her question, suddenly darted towards it. The queer way in which he ran with his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders, and his body bent a little forward, struck Nance as peculiarly fascinating. When he reached the hedge he hovered momentarily in front of it and then pounced at something. “Missed!” he cried in a peevish voice. “Damn the little scoundrel! A shrew-mouse! That’s what it was! A shrew-mouse!”

He came hurrying back as fast as he went, almost as if Nance herself had been some kind of furred or feathered animal that might disappear if it were not held fast.

“I beg your pardon, Madam,” he said, breathlessly, “but you don’t often see those so near the town. Hullo!” This last exclamation was caused by the appearance, not many paces from them, of Adrian Sorio himself who emerged from a gap in the hedge, hatless and excited.

“I was on the tow-path,” he gasped, “and I caught sight of you. I was afraid you’d have started. Baltazar made me go with him to the station.” He paused and stared at Nance’s companion.

The latter looked so extremely uncomfortable that the girl hastened to come to his rescue.

“This gentleman was just going to show me the way,” she said, “to your friend’s house. Look, Adrian! Aren’t these lovely?”

She held out the dandelions towards him, but he disregarded them.

“Well,” he remarked rather brusquely, “now I’ve found you, I fancy we’d better go back the way we came. I’m longing to see how Linda feels. I want to take her down to the sea this afternoon. Shall we do that? Or perhaps you can’t both leave Miss Doorm at the same time?”

He stared at the stranger as if bidding him clear off. But the admirer of shrew-mice had recovered his equanimity. “I know Mr. Stork well,” he remarked to Sorio. “He and I are quite old friends. I was just asking this lady if she had ever been in the fens before, but I gather this is her first visit.”

Adrian had by this time begun to look so morose that Nance broke in hurriedly.

“We must introduce ourselves,” she said. “My name is Miss Herrick. This is Mr. Adrian Sorio.” She paused and waited. A long shrill cry followed by a most melancholy wail which gradually died away in the distance, came to them over the marshes.

“A curlew,” remarked the intruder. “Beautiful and curious—and with very interesting mating habits. They are rare, too.”

“Come along, Nance,” Sorio burst out. But the girl turned to her new acquaintance and extended her hand.

“You haven’t told us your name yet,” she said. “I hope we shall meet again.”

The stranger gave her a look which, for caressing softness, could only be compared to a virtuoso’s finger laid upon an incomparable piece of Egyptian pottery.

“Certainly we shall meet,” he murmured. “Of course, most certainly. I know every one here. My name is Raughty—Doctor Fingal Raughty. I was with old Doorm when he died. A noble head, though rather malformed behind the ears. He had a peculiar smell too—not unpleasant—rather musky in fact. They called him Badger in the village. He could drink more gin at a sitting than any man I have ever seen. He resembled the portraits of Descartes. Good-bye, Miss—Nance!”

As soon as the lovers were alone Sorio’s rage broke forth.

“What a man!” he cried. “Who gave him leave to talk like that of Mr. Doorm? How did he know you weren’t related to him? And what surpassing coolness to call you by your Christian name! Confound him—he’s gone the way we wanted to go. I believe he knew that. Look! He’s fooling about in the ditch, waiting for us to overtake him!”

Nance could not help laughing a little at this. “Not at all, my dear. He’s looking for shrew-mice.”

“What?” rejoined the other crossly. “On the public road? He’s mad. Come, we must get round him somehow. Let’s go through here and hit the tow path.”

They had no more interruptions as they strolled slowly back along the river’s bank. Nance was perplexed, however, by Adrian’s temper. He seemed irritable and brusque. She had never known him in such a mood, and a dim, obscure apprehension to which she could assign no adequate cause, began to invade her heart.

They had both become so silent, and the girl’s nerves had been so set on edge by his unusual attitude towards her, that she gave a quite perceptible start when he suddenly pointed across the stream to a clump of oak trees, the only ones, he told her, to be found in the neighbourhood.

“There’s something behind them,” she remarked, “a house of some kind. I shouldn’t like to live out in that place. How they must hear the wind! It must howl and moan sometimes—mustn’t it?” She smiled at him and shivered.

“I think I miss London Bridge Road a little, and—Kensington Park. Don’t you, too, Adrian?”

“Yes, there’s a house behind them,” Sorio repeated, disregarding her last words and staring fixedly at the oak trees. “There’s a house behind them.”

His manner was so queer that the girl looked at him with serious alarm.

“What’s the matter with you, Adrian?” she said. “I’ve never known you like this—”

“It’s where the Renshaws live,” her lover continued. “They have a kind of park. Its wall runs close to the village. Some of the trees are very old. I walked there this morning before breakfast. Baltazar advised me to.”

Nance looked at him still more nervously. Then she gave a little forced laugh. “That is why you were so late in coming to see me, I suppose! Well, you say the Renshaws live there. May one ask who the Renshaws are?”

He took the girl’s arm in his own and dragged her forward at a rapid pace. She remarked that it was not until some wide-spreading willows on the further side of the river concealed the clump of oaks that he replied to her question.

“Baltazar told me everything about them. He ought to know, for he’s one of them himself. Yes, he’s one of them. He’s the son of old Herman, Brand’s father; not legitimate, of course, and Brand isn’t always kind to him. But he’s one of them.”

He stopped abruptly on this last word and Nance caught him throwing a furtive glance across the stream.

“Who are they, Adrian? Who are they?” repeated the girl.

“I’ll tell you,” he cried, with strange irritation. “I’ll tell you everything! When haven’t I told you everything? They are brewers. That isn’t very romantic, is it? And I suppose you might call them landowners, too. They’ve lived here forever, it seems, and in the same house.”

He burst into an uneasy laugh.

“In the same house for centuries and centuries! The churchyard is full of them. It’s only lately they’ve taken to be brewers—I suppose the land don’t pay for their vices.”

And again he laughed in the same jarring and ungenial way.

“Brand employs Baltazar—just as if he wasn’t his brother at all—in the office at Mundham. You remember Mundham? We came through it in the train. It’s over there,” he waved his hand in front of him, “about seven miles off. It’s a horrid place—all slums and canals. That’s where they make their beer. Their beer!” He laughed again.

“You haven’t yet told me who they are—I mean who else there is,” observed Nance while, for some reason or other, her heart began to beat tumultuously.

“Haven’t I said I’d tell you everything?” Sorio flung out. “I’ll tell you more than you bargain for, if you tease me. Oh, confound it! There’s Rachel and Linda! Look now, do they appear as if they were happy?”

Favoured by the wind which blew sea-wards, the lovers had been permitted to approach quite close to their friends without any betrayal of their presence.

Linda was seated on the river bank, her head in her hands, while Miss Doorm, like a black-robed priestess of some ancient ritual, leant against the trunk of a leafless pollard.

“They were perfectly happy when I left them,” whispered Nance, but she was conscious as she spoke of a cold, miserable misgiving in her inmost spirit. Like a flash her mind reverted to the lilac bushes of the London garden, and a sick loneliness seized her.

“Linda!” she cried, with a quiver of remorse in her voice. The young girl leapt hurriedly to her feet, and Miss Doorm removed her hand from the tree. A quick look passed between the sisters, but Nance understood nothing of what Linda’s expression conveyed. They moved on together, Adrian with Linda and Nance with Rachel.

“What do they call this river?” Nance enquired of her companion, as soon as she felt reassured by the sound of the girl’s laugh.

“The Loon, my dear,” replied Miss Doorm. “They call it the Loon. It runs through Mundham and then through the fens. It forms the harbour at Rodmoor.”

Nance sat silent. In the depths of her heart she made a resolution. She would find some work to do here in Rodmoor. It was intolerable to be dependent on any one. Yes, she would find work, and, if need be, take Linda to live with her.

She felt now, though she would have found it hard to explain the obscure reason for it, more reluctant than ever to return to London. Every pulse of her body vibrated with a strange excitement. A reckless fighting spirit surged up within her. Not easily, not quickly, should her hold on the man she loved be loosed! But she felt danger on the horizon—nearer than the horizon. She felt it in her bones.

They had now reached the foot of Rachel’s garden and there was a general pause in order that Adrian might do justice to the heavy architecture of Dyke House, as it was called—that house which the Badger—to follow Doctor Raughty’s tale—had taken into his “noble” but “malformed” head to leave to his solitary descendant.

As they passed in one by one through the little dilapidated gate, Nance had a sudden inspiration. She seized her lover by the wrist. “Adrian,” she whispered, “has there been anything—any one—to remind you—of what—you saw—that morning?”

She could not but believe that he had heard her and caught her meaning, yet it was hard to assume it, for his tone was calm and natural as he answered her, apparently quite misunderstanding her words:

“The sea, you mean? Yes, I’ve heard it all night and all day. We’ll go down there this afternoon, and Linda with us.” He raised his voice. “You’ll come to the sea, Linda; eh, child? To the Rodmoor sea?”

The words died away over the river and across the fens. The others had already entered the house, but a laughing white face at one of the windows and the tapping of girlish hands on the closed pane seemed to indicate acquiescence in what he suggested.