Nance continued to resort to her withy-bed, in spite of the spoiling of its charm, but she did not again ask Sorio to meet her there. She met him still, however,—sometimes in Rachel’s desolate garden which seemed inspired by some occult influence antipathetic to every softening touch, and sometimes—and these latter encounters were the happier ones—in the little graveyard of Mr. Traherne’s church. She found him affectionate enough in these ambiguous days and even tender, but she was constantly aware of a barrier between them which nothing she could say or do seemed able to surmount.

Her anxiety with regard to the relations between Rachel and Linda did not grow less as days went on. Sometimes the two seemed perfectly happy and Nance accused herself of having a morbid imagination, but then again something would occur—some quite slight and unimportant thing—which threw her back upon all her old misgivings.

Once she was certain she heard Linda crying in the night and uttering Rachel’s name but the young girl, when roused from her sleep, only laughed gaily and vowed she had no recollection of anything she had dreamed.

As things thus went on and there seemed no outlet from the difficulties that surrounded her, Nance began making serious enquiries as to the possibility of finding work in the neighbourhood. She read the advertisements in the local papers and even answered some of them but the weeks slipped by and nothing tangible seemed to emerge.

Her greatest consolation at this time was a friendship she struck up with Hamish Traherne, the curate-in-charge of Rodmoor upon whose organ in the forlorn little Norman church, Linda was now daily practising.

Dr. Raughty, too, when she chanced to meet him, proved a soothing distraction. The man’s evident admiration for her gratified her vanity, while her tender and playful way of expressing it put a healing ointment upon her wounded pride.

One late afternoon when the sun at last seemed to have got some degree of hold upon that sea-blighted country, she found herself seated with Mr. Traherne on a bench adjoining the churchyard, waiting there in part for the service—for Hamish was a rigorous ritualist in these things and rang his bell twice a day with devoted patience—and in part for the purpose of meeting Mrs. Renshaw, who, as she knew, came regularly to church, morning and evening.

Linda was playing inside the little stone edifice and the sound of her music came out to them as they talked, pleasantly softened by the intervening walls. Mr. Traherne’s own dwelling, a battered, time-worn fragment of monastic masonry, clumsily adapted to modern use, lay behind them, its unpretentious garden passing by such imperceptible degrees into the sacred enclosure that the blossoms raised, in defiance of the winds that swept the marshes, in the priest’s flower-beds, shed their petals upon the more recently dug of his parishioners’ graves.

It may have been the extreme ugliness of Rodmoor’s curate-in-charge that drew Nance so closely to him. Mr. Traherne was certainly in bodily appearance the least prepossessing person she had ever beheld. He resembled nothing so much as an over-driven and excessively patient horse, his long, receding chin, knobbed bulbous nose, and corrugated forehead not even being relieved by any particular quality in his small, deeply-set colourless eyes—eyes which lacked everything such as commonly redeems an otherwise insignificant face and which stared out of his head upon the world with a fixed expression of mild and dumb protest.

Whether it was his ugliness, or something indefinable in him that found no physical or even vocal expression—for his voice was harsh and husky—the girl herself would have been puzzled to say, but whatever it was, it drew her and held her and she experienced curious relief in talking with him.

This particular afternoon she had permitted herself to go further than usual in these relieving confidences and had treated the poor man as if he were actually and in very truth her father-confessor.

“I’ve had no luck so far,” she said, speaking of her attempts to get work, “but I think I shall have before long. I’m right, am I not, in that at any rate? Whatever happens, it’s better Linda and I should be independent.”

The priest nodded vigorously and clasped his bony hands over his knees.

“I wish,” he said, “that I knew Mr. Sorio as I know you. When I know people I like them, and as a rule—” he opened his large twisted mouth and smiled humorously at her—“as a rule they like me.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand what I said just now,” cried Nance anxiously. “I didn’t mean that Adrian doesn’t like you. I know he likes you very much. It’s that he’s afraid of your influence, of your religion, of your goodness. He’s afraid of you. That’s what it is.”

“Of course we know,” said Hamish Traherne, prodding the ground with his oak stick and tucking his long cassock round his legs, “of course we know that it’s really Mr. Sorio who ought to find work. He ought to find it soon, too, and as soon as he’s got it he ought to marry you! That’s how I would see this affair settled.” He smiled at her with humorous benignity.

Nance frowned a little. “I don’t like it when you talk like that,” she remarked, “it makes me feel as though I’d done wrong in saying anything about it. It makes me feel as though I had been disloyal to Adrian.”

For so ugly and clumsy a man, there was a pathetic gentleness in the way he laid his hand, at that, upon his companion’s arm. “The disloyalty,” he said in a low voice, “would have been not to have spoken to me. Who else can help our friend? Who else is anxious to help him?”

“I know, I know,” she cried, “you’re as sweet to me as you can be. You’re my most faithful friend. It’s only that I feel—sometimes—as though Adrian wouldn’t like it for me to talk about him at all—to any one. But that’s silly, isn’t it? And besides I must, mustn’t I? Otherwise there’d be no way of helping him.”

“I’ll find a way,” muttered the priest. “You needn’t mention his name again. We’ll take him for granted in future, little one, and we’ll both work together in his interests.”

“If he could only be made to understand,” the girl went on, looking helplessly across the vast tract of fens, “what his real feelings are! I believe he loves me at the bottom of his heart. I know I can help him as no one else can. But how to make him understand that?”

They were interrupted at this point by the appearance of Mrs. Renshaw who, standing in the path leading to the church door, looked at them hesitatingly as if wondering whether she ought to approach them or not.

They rose at once and crossed the grass to meet her. At the same time Linda, emerging from the building, greeted them with excited ardour.

“I’ve done so well to-day, Mr. Traherne,” she cried, “you’d be astonished. I can manage those pedals perfectly now, and the stops too. Oh, it’s lovely! It’s lovely! I feel I’m going really to be a player.”

They all shook hands with Mrs. Renshaw, and then, while the priest went in to ring his bell, the three women strolled together to the low stone parapet built as a protection against floods, which separated the churchyard from the marshes.

Tiny, delicate mosses grew on this wall, interspersed with small pale-flowered weeds. On its further side was a wide tract of boggy ground, full of deep amber-coloured pools and clumps of rushes and terminated, some half mile away, by a raised dyke. There was a pleasant humming of insects in the air, and although a procession of large white clouds kept crossing the low, horizontal sun, and throwing their cold shadows over the landscape, the general aspect of the place was more friendly and less desolate than usual.

They sat down upon the parapet and began to talk. “Brand promised to come and fetch me to-night,” said Mrs. Renshaw. “I begged him to come in time for the service but—” and she gave a sad, expressive little laugh, “he said he wouldn’t be early enough for that. Why is it, do you think, that men in these days are so unwilling to do these things? It isn’t that they’re wiser than their ancestors. It isn’t that they’re cleverer. It isn’t that they have less need of the Invisible. Something has come over the world, I think—something that blots out the sky. I’ve thought that often lately, particularly when I wake up in the mornings. It seems to me that the dawns used to be fresher and clearer than they are now. God has got tired of helping us, my dears,” and she sighed wearily.

Linda extended her warm little hand with a caressing movement, and Nance said, gently, “I know well what you mean, but I feel sure—oh, I feel quite sure—it’s only for a time. And I think, too, in some odd way, that it’s our own fault—I mean the fault of women. I can’t express clearly what’s in my mind but I feel as though we’d all changed—changed, that is, from what we used to be in old days. Don’t you think there’s something in that, Mrs. Renshaw? But of course that only applies to Linda and me.”

The elder woman’s countenance assumed a pinched and withered look as the girl spoke, the lines in it deepening and the pallor of it growing so noticeable that Nance found herself recalling the ghastly whiteness of her father’s face as she saw him at the last, laid out in his coffin. She shivered a little and let her fingers stray over the crumbling masonry and tangled weeds at her side, seeking there, in a fumbling, instinctive manner, to get into touch with something natural, earthy, and reassuring.

The procession of clouds suffered a brief interlude at that moment in their steady transit and the sinking sun shone out warm and mellow, full of odours of peat and moss and reedy mud. Swarms of tiny midges danced in the long level light and several drowsy butterflies rose out of nowhere and fluttered over the mounds.

“Oh, there’s Brand coming!” cried Mrs. Renshaw, suddenly, with a queer contraction of her pale forehead, “and the bell has stopped. How strange we none of us noticed that! Listen! Yes—he’s begun the service. Can’t you hear? Oh, what a pity! I can’t bear going in after he’s begun.”

Brand Renshaw, striding unceremoniously over the graves, approached the group. They rose to greet him. Nance felt herself surveyed from head to foot, weighed in the balances and found wanting. Linda hung back a little, shamefaced and blushing deeply. It was upon her that Brand kept his eyes fixed all the while he was being introduced. She—as Nance recognized in a flash—was not found wanting.

They stood talking together, easily and freely enough, for several minutes, but nothing that Nance heard or said prevented her mind from envisaging the fact that there had leapt into being, magnetically, mysteriously, irresistibly, one of those sudden attractions between a man and a girl that so often imply—as the world is now arranged—the emergence of tragedy upon the horizon.

“I think—if you don’t mind, Brand,” said Mrs. Renshaw when a pause arrived in their conversation, “we’ll slip into the church now for a minute or two. He’s got to the Psalms. I can hear. And it hurts me, somehow, for the poor man to have to go through them alone.”

Nance moved at once, but Linda pouted and looked shyly at Brand. “I’m tired of the church,” she murmured. “I’ll wait for you out here. Are you going in with them, Mr. Renshaw?”

Brand made no reply to this, but walked gravely with the two others as far as the porch.

“Don’t be surprised if your sister’s spirited away when you come out, Miss Herrick,” he said smilingly as he left them at the door.

Returning with a quick step to where Linda stood gazing across the marshes, he made some casual remark about the quietness of the evening and led her forth from the churchyard. Neither of them uttered any definite reference to what they were doing. Indeed, a queer sort of nervous dumbness seemed to have seized them both, but there was a suppressed surge of excitement in the man’s resolute movements and under the navy blue coat and skirt which hung so delicately and closely round her slender figure. The girl’s pulses beat a wild excited tune.

He led her straight along the narrow, reed-bordered path, with a ditch on either side of it which ended in the bridge across the Loon. Before they reached the bridge, however, he swerved to the left and helped her over a low wooden railing. From this point, by following a rough track along the edge of one of the water meadows it was possible to reach the sand-dunes without entering the village.

“Not to the sea,” pleaded Linda, holding back when she perceived the direction of their steps.

“Yes, to the sea!” he cried, pulling her forward with merciless determination. She made no further resistance. She did not even protest when, arrived at the end of their path, he lifted her bodily over the gate that barred their way. She let him help her across the heavily sinking sand, covered with pallid, coarse grass which yielded to every step they took. She let him, when at last they reached the summit of the dunes and saw the sea spread out before them, retain the hand she had given him and lead her down, hardly holding back at all now, to the very edge of the water.

They were both at that moment like persons under the power of some sort of drug. Their eyes were wild and bright and when they spoke their voices had an unnatural solemnity. In the absoluteness of the magnetic current which swept them together, they could do nothing, it seemed, but take all that happened to them for granted—take all—all—as if it could not be otherwise, as if it were unthinkable otherwise.

When they reached the place where the tide turned and the tremulous line of spindrift glimmered in the dying sunlight, the girl stopped at last. Her lips and cheeks were pale as the foam itself. She tried to tear her fingers from his grasp. Her feet, sinking in the wet sand, were splashed by the inflowing water.

“They told me you were afraid,” he muttered, and his voice sounded to them both as if it came from far away, “but I didn’t believe it. I thought it was some little girl’s nonsense. But I see now they were right. You are afraid.”

He rose to his full height, drawing into his lungs with a breath of ecstasy the sharp salt wind that blew across the water’s surface.

“But out of your fear we’ll make a bond between us,” he went on, raising his voice, “a bond which none of them shall be able to break!”

He suddenly bent down and, scooping with his fingers in the water, lifted towards her a handful of sea-foam that gleamed ghostly white as he held it.

“There, child,” he cried, “you can’t escape from me now!”

As he spoke he flung, with a wild laugh, straight across her face, the foam-bubbles which he had caught. She started back with a little gasp, but recovering herself instantly lifted the hand which held her own and pressed it against her forehead. They stood for a moment, after this, staring at one another, with a hushed, dazed, bewildered stare, as though they felt the very wind of the wing of fate pass over their heads.

Brand broke the spell with a laugh. “I’ve christened you now,” he said, “so I can call you what I like. Come up here, Linda, my little one, and let’s talk of all this.”

Hand in hand they moved away from the sea’s edge and crouched down in the shadow of the sand-dunes. The rose-coloured light died out along the line of foam and the mass of the waters in front of them darkened steadily, as if obscured by the over-hovering of some colossal bird. Far off, on the edge of the horizon, a single fragment of drifting cloud took the shape of a bloody hand with outstretched forefinger but even that soon faded as the sun, sinking into the fens behind them, gave up the struggle with darkness.

With the passing of the light from the sea’s surface, all that was left of the wind sank also into absolute immobility. An immense liberating silence intensified, rather than interrupted by the monotonous splash of the waves, seemed to stream forth from some planetary reservoir and overflow the world.

Not a sea-gull screamed, not a sound came from the harbour, not a plover cried from the marshes, not a step, not a voice, not a whisper, approached their solitude or disturbed their strange communion.

Linda sat with her head sunk low upon her breast and her hands clasped upon her knees. Brand, beside her, caressed her whole figure with an intense gaze of concentrated possession.

Neither of them spoke a word, but one of the man’s heavy hands lay upon hers like a leaden weight bruising a fragile plant.

What he seemed attempting to achieve in that conspiring hour was some kind of magnetizing of the girl’s senses so that the first movement of overt passion should come from her rather than from himself. In this it would seem he was not unsuccessful, for after two or three scarce audible sighs her body trembled a little and leant towards his and a low whisper uttered in a tone quite unlike her ordinary one, tore itself from her lips, as if against her volition.

“What are you doing to me?” she murmured.

While the invisible destinies were thus inaugurating their projected work upon Brand and Linda, Nance and Mrs. Renshaw issued forth from the churchyard.

“If only life were clearer,” the girl was thinking, “it would be endurable. It’s this uncertainty in everything—this dreadful uncertainty—which I can’t bear!”

“That was a beautiful psalm we had just now,” said Mrs. Renshaw, in her gentle penetrating voice as, after some minutes’ silent walking they emerged upon the bridge across the Loon. Nance looked down over the parapet and in her depressed fancy she saw the drowned figure of herself, drifting, face upward, upon the flowing water.

“Yes,” she replied mechanically, “the psalms are always beautiful.”

“I don’t believe,” the lady went on, glancing at her with eyes so hollow and sorrowful that it seemed as though the twilight of a world even sadder than the one they looked upon emanated from them, “I don’t believe I understand that little sister of yours. She’s very highly strung—she’s very nervous. She requires a great deal of care. To tell the truth, I don’t consider my son Brand at all a good companion for her. I wish they’d waited and not gone off like that. He doesn’t always remember what a sensitive thing the heart of a young girl is.”

They had now reached the southern side of the Loon and were on the main road between Rodmoor and Mundham. A few paces further brought them to the first houses of the village. Something in the helpless, apologetic, deprecatory way with which, just then, Mrs. Renshaw greeted an old woman who passed them, had a strangely irritating effect upon Nance’s nerves.

“I don’t see why young people should be considered more than any one else!” she burst out. “It’s a purely conventional idea. We all have our troubles, and what I think is the older you get the more difficult life becomes.”

Mrs. Renshaw’s face assumed a mask of weary obstinacy and she walked more slowly, her head bent forward a little and her feet dragging.

“Women have to learn what duty means,” she said, “and the sooner they learn it the better. Those among us who are privileged to make one good man happy have the best that life can give. It’s natural to be restless till you have this. But we must try to overcome our restlessness. We must ask for help.”

She was silent. Her white face drooped and bowed itself, while her tired fingers relaxed their hold on her skirt which trailed in the dust of the road. Her profile, as Nance glanced sideways at it, had a look of hopeless and helpless passivity.

The girl withdrew into herself, irritated and yet remorseful. She felt an obscure longing to be of some service to this unhappy one; yet as she watched her, thus bowed and impenetrable, she felt shut out and excluded.

Before they reached the centre of the village—for Nance felt unwilling to leave Mrs. Renshaw until she had seen her safe within her park gates—they suddenly came upon Baltazar Stork returning from his daily excursion to Mundham.

He was as elegantly dressed as usual and in one hand carried a little black bag, in the other a bunch of peonies. Nance, to her surprise, caught upon her companion’s face a look of extraordinary illumination as the man advanced towards them. In recalling the look afterwards, she found herself thinking of the word “vivacity” in regard to it.

“Oh, I’m always the same,” Mr. Stork replied to the elder lady’s greeting. “I grow more annoyingly the same every day. I say the same things, think the same thoughts and meet the same people. It’s—lovely!”

“I’m glad you ended like that,” observed Nance, laughing. It was one of her peculiarities to laugh—a little foolishly—when she was embarrassed and though she had encountered Sorio’s friend once or twice before, she felt for some reason or other ill at ease with him.

With exquisite deliberation Mr. Stork placed the black bag upon the ground and selecting two of the freshest blooms from his gorgeous bunch, handed one by the light of a little shop window to each of the women.

“How is your friend?” enquired Mrs. Renshaw with a touch of irony in her tone. “This young lady has not seen him to-day.”

At that moment Nance realized that she hated this melancholy being whom a chance encounter with her husband’s son seemed to throw into such malicious spirits. She felt that everything Mrs. Renshaw was destined to say from now till they separated, would be designed to humiliate and annoy her. This may have been a fantastic illusion, but she acted upon it with resolute abruptness.

“Good-bye,” she exclaimed, turning to her companion, “I’ll leave you in Mr. Stork’s care. I promised Rachel not to be late to-night. Good-bye—and thank you,” she bowed to the young man and held up the peony, “for this.”

“She’s jealous,” remarked Baltazar as he led Mrs. Renshaw across the green under the darkening sycamores. “She is abominably jealous! She was in a furious temper—I saw it myself—when Adrian took her sister out the other day and now she’s wild because he’s friendly with Philippa. Oh, these girls, these girls!”

An amused smile flickered for a moment across the lady’s face but she suppressed it instantly. She sighed heavily. “You are all too much for me,” she said, “too much for me. I’m getting old, Tassar. God be merciful! This world is not an easy place to live in.”

She walked by his side after this in heavy silence till they reached the entrance of the park.