The long summer afternoon was nearly over by the time James Andersen reached the Seven Ashes. The declining sun had sunk so low that it was invisible from the spot where he stood, but its last horizontal rays cast a warm ruddy light over the tree-tops in the valley. The high and exposed intersection of sandy lanes, which for time immemorial had borne this title, was, at the epoch which concerns us, no longer faithful to its name.

The ash-trees which Andersen now surveyed, with the feverish glance of mental obsession, were not seven in number. They were indeed only three; and, of these three, one was no more than a time-worn stump, and the others but newly-planted saplings. Such as they were, however, they served well enough to continue the tradition of the place, and their presence enhanced with a note of added melancholy the gloomy character of the scene.

Seven Ashes, with its cross-roads, formed indeed the extreme northern angle of the high winding ridge which terminated at Wild Pine. Approached from the road leading to this latter spot,—a road darkened on either hand by wind-swept Scotch-firs—it was the sort of place where, in less civilized times, one might have expected to encounter a threatening highwayman, or at least to have stumbled upon some sinister witch-figure stooping over an unholy task or groping among the weeds. Even in modern times and in bright sunshine the spot was not one where a traveller was induced to linger upon his way or to rest himself. When overcast, as it was at the moment of Andersen’s approach, by the coming on of twilight, it was a place from which a normal-minded person would naturally be in haste to turn. There was something ominous in its bleak exposure to the four quarters of the sky, and something full of ghostly suggestiveness in the gaping mouths of the narrow lanes that led away from it.

There was, however, another and a much more definite justification for the quickening, at this point, of any wayfarer’s steps who knew the locality. A stranger to the place, glancing across an empty field, would have observed with no particular interest the presence of a moderately high stone wall protecting a small square enclosure. Were such a one acquainted with the survivals of old usage in English villages, he might have supposed these walls to shut in the now unused space of what was formerly the local “pound,” or repository for stray animals. Such travellers as were familiar with Nevilton knew, however, that sequestered within this citadel of desolation were no living horses nor cattle, but very different and much quieter prisoners. The Methodist cemetery there, dates back, it is said, to the days of religious persecution, to the days of Whitfield and Wesley, if not even further.

Our fugitive from the society of those who regard their minds as normally constituted, cast an excited and recognizant eye upon this forlorn enclosure. Plucking a handful of leaves from one of the ash-trees and thrusting them into his pocket, some queer legend—half-remembered in his agitated state—impelling him to this quaint action, he left the roadway, crossed the field, and pushing open the rusty iron gate of the little burying-ground, burst hurriedly in among its weather-stained memorials of the dead.

Though not of any great height, the enclosing walls of the place were sufficient to intensify by several degrees the gathering shadows. Outside, in the open field, one would have anticipated a clear hour of twilight before the darkness fell; but here, among the graves of these humble recalcitrants against spiritual authority, it seemed as though the plunge of the planet into its diurnal obscuring was likely to be retarded for only a few brief moments.

James Andersen sat down upon a nameless mound, and fixed his gaze upon the heap of stones referred to by Mr. Quincunx. The evening was warm and still, and though the sky yet retained much of its lightness of colour, the invading darkness—like a beast on padded feet—was felt as a palpable presence moving slowly among the tombs.

The stone-carver began muttering in a low voice scattered and incoherent repetitions of his conversation with the potato-digger. But his voice suddenly died away under a startling interruption. He became aware that the heavy cemetery gate was being pushed open from outside.

Such is the curious law regulating the action of human nerves, and making them dependent upon the mood of the mind to which they are attached, that an event which to a normal consciousness is fraught with ghostly terror, to a consciousness already strained beyond the breaking point, appears as something natural and ordinary. It is one of the privileges of mania, that those thus afflicted should be freed from the normal oppression of human terror. A madman would take a ghost into his arms.

On this occasion, however, the most normal nerves would have suffered no shock from the figure that presented itself in the entrance when the door was fully opened. A young girl, pale and breathless, rushed impulsively into the cemetery, and catching sight of Andersen at once, hastened straight to him across the grave-mounds.

“I was coming back from the village,” she gasped, preventing him with a trembling pressure of her hand from rising from his seat, and casting herself down beside him, “and I met Mr. Clavering. He told me you had gone off somewhere and I guessed at once it was to Dead Man’s Lane. I said nothing to him, but as soon as he had left me, I ran nearly all the way to the cottage. The gentleman there told me to follow you. He said it was on his conscience that he had advised you to come up here. He said he was just making up his mind to come on after you, but he thought it was better for me to come. So here I am! James—dear James—you are not really ill are you? They frightened me, those two, by what they said. They seemed to be afraid that you would hurt yourself if you went off alone. But you wouldn’t James dear, would you? You would think of me a little?”

She knelt at his side and tenderly pushed back the hair from his brow. “Oh I love you so!” she murmured, “I love you so! It would kill me if anything dreadful happened to you.” She pressed his head passionately against her breast, hardly conscious in her emotion of the burning heat of his forehead as it touched her skin.

“You will think of me a little!” she pleaded, “you will take care of yourself for my sake, Jim?”

She held him thus, pressed tightly against her, for several seconds, while her bosom rose and fell in quick spasms of convulsive pity. She had torn off her hat in her agitation, and flung it heedlessly down at her feet, and a heavy tress of her thick auburn hair—colourless now as the night itself—fell loosely upon her bowed neck. The fading light from the sky above them seemed to concentrate itself upon the ivory pallor of her clasped fingers and the dead-white glimmer of her impassioned face. She might have risen out of one of the graves that surrounded them, so ghostly in the gloom did her figure look.

The stone-carver freed himself at length, and took her hands in his own. The shock of the girl’s emotion had quieted his own fever. From the touch of her flesh he seemed to have derived a new and rational calm.

“Little Ninsy!” he whispered. “Little Ninsy! It is not I, but you, who are ill. Have you been up, and about, many days? I didn’t know it! I’ve had troubles of my own.” He passed his hand across his forehead. “I’ve had dreams, dreams and fancies! I’m afraid I’ve made a fool of myself, and frightened all sorts of people. I think I must have been saying a lot of silly things today. My head feels still queer. It’s hurt me so much lately, my head! And I’ve heard voices, voices that wouldn’t stop.”

“Oh James, my darling, my darling!” cried the girl, in a great passion of relief. “I knew what they said wasn’t true. I knew you would speak gently to me, and be your old self. Love me, James! Love me as you used to in the old days.”

She rose to her feet and pulled him up upon his. Then with a passionate abandonment she flung her arms round him and pressed him to her, clinging to him with all her force and trembling as she clung.

James yielded to her emotion more spontaneously than he had ever done in his life. Their lips met in a long in-drawing kiss which seemed to merge their separate identities, and blend them indissolubly together. She clung to him as a bind-weed, with its frail white flowers, might cling to a stalk of swaying corn, and not unlike such an entwined stalk, he swayed to and fro under the clinging of her limbs. The passion which possessed her communicated itself to him, and in a strange ecstasy of oblivion he embraced her as desperately as her wild love could wish.

From sheer exhaustion their lips parted at last, and they sank down, side by side, upon the dew-drenched grass, making the grave-mount their pillow. Obscurely, through the clouded chamber of his brain, passed the image of her poppy-scarlet mouth burning against the whiteness of her skin. All that he could now actually see of her face, in the darkness, was its glimmering pallor, but the feeling of her kiss remained and merged itself in this impression. He lay on his back with closed eyes, and she bent over him as he lay, and began kissing him again, as if her soul would never be satisfied. In the intervals of her kisses, she pressed her fingers against his forehead, and uttered incoherent and tender whispers. It seemed to her as though, by the very magnetism of her devotion, she must be able to restore his shattered wits.

Nor did her efforts seem in vain. After a while the stone-carver lifted himself up and looked round him. He smiled affectionately at Ninsy and patted her, almost playfully, upon the knee.

“You have done me good, child,” he said. “You have done me more good than you know. I don’t think I shall say any more silly things tonight.”

He stood up on his feet, heaved a deep, natural sigh, and stretched himself, as one roused from a long sleep.

“What have you managed to do to me, Ninsy?” he asked. “I feel completely different. Those voices in my head have stopped.” He turned tenderly towards her. “I believe you’ve driven the evil spirit out of me, child,” he said.

She flung her arms round him with a gasping cry. “You do like me a little, Jim? Oh my darling, I love you so much! I love you! I love you!” She clung to him with frenzied passion, her breast convulsed with sobs, and the salt tears mingling with her kisses.

Suddenly, as he held her body in his arms, he felt a shuddering tremor run through her, from head to foot. Her head fell back, helpless and heavy, and her whole frame hung limp and passive upon his arm. It almost seemed as though, in exorcising, by the magnetic power of her love, the demon that possessed him, she had broken her own heart.

Andersen was overwhelmed with alarm and remorse. He laid her gently upon the ground, and chafed the palms of her hands whispering her name and uttering savage appeals to Providence. His appeals, however, remained unanswered, and she lay deadly still, her coils of dusky hair spread loose over the wet grass.

He rose in mute dismay, and stared angrily round the cemetery, as if demanding assistance from its silent population. Then with a glance at her motionless form, he ran quickly to the open gate and shouted loudly for help. His voice echoed hollowly through the walled enclosure, and a startled flutter of wings rose from the distant fir-trees. Somewhere down in the valley, a dog began to bark, but no other answer to his repeated cry reached his ears. He returned to the girl’s side.

Frantically he rent open her dress at the throat and tore with trembling fingers at the laces of her bodice. He pressed his hand against her heart. A faint, scarcely discernible tremor under her soft breast reassured him. She was not dead, then! He had not killed her with his madness.

He bent down and made an effort to lift her in his arms, but his limbs trembled beneath him and his muscles collapsed helplessly. The reaction from the tempest in his brain had left him weak as an infant. In this wretched inability to do anything to restore her he burst into a fit of piteous tears, and struck his forehead with his clenched hand.

Once more he tried desperately to lift her, and once more, fragile as she was, the effort proved hopelessly beyond his strength. Suddenly, out of the darkness beyond the cemetery gate, he heard the sound of voices.

He shouted as loudly as he could and then listened intently, with beating heart. An answering shout responded, in Luke’s well-known voice. A moment or two later, and Luke himself, followed by Mr. Quincunx, hurried into the cemetery.

Immediately after Ninsy’s departure the recluse had been seized with uncontrollable remorse. Mixed with his remorse was the disturbing consciousness that since Ninsy knew he had advised Andersen to make his way to Seven Ashes, the knowledge was ultimately sure to reach the younger brother’s ears. Luke was one of the few intimates Mr. Quincunx possessed in Nevilton. The recluse held him in curious respect as a formidable and effective man of the world. He had an exaggerated notion of his power. He had grown accustomed to his evening visits. He was fond of him and a little afraid of him.

It was therefore an extremely disagreeable thought to his mind, to conceive of Luke as turning upon him with contempt and indignation. Thus impelled, the perturbed solitary had summoned up all his courage and gone boldly down into the village to find the younger Andersen. He had met him at the gate of Mr. Taxater’s house.

Left behind in the station field by James and his pursuers, Luke had reverted for a while with the conscious purpose of distracting his mind, to his old preoccupation, and had spent the afternoon in a manner eminently congenial, making love to two damsels at the same time, and parrying with evasive urbanity their combined recriminations.

At the close of the afternoon, having chatted for an hour with the station-master’s wife, and shared their family tea, he had made his way according to his promise, into Mr. Taxater’s book-lined study, and there, closely closeted with the papal champion, had smoothed out the final threads of the conspiracy that was to betray Gladys and liberate Lacrima.

Luke had been informed by Mr. Quincunx of every detail of James’ movements and of Ninsy’s appearance on the scene. The recluse, as the reader may believe, did not spare himself in any point. He even exaggerated his fear of the agitated stone-carver, and as they hastened together towards Seven Ashes, he narrated, down to the smallest particular, the strange conversation they had had in his potato-garden.

“Why do you suppose,” he enquired of Luke, as they ascended the final slope of the hill, “he talked so much of someone giving me money? Who, on earth, is likely to give me money? People don’t as a rule throw money about, like that, do they? And if they did, I am the last person they would throw it to. I am the sort of person that kind and good people naturally hate. It’s because they know I know the deep little vanities and cunning selfishness in their blessed deeds.

“No one in this world really acts from pure motives. We are all grasping after our own gain. We are all pleased when other people come to grief, and sorry when things go well with them. It’s human nature, that’s what it is! Human nature is always vicious. It was human nature in me that made me send your brother up this hill, instead of taking him back to the village. It was human nature in you that made you curse me as you did, when I first told you.”

Luke did his best to draw Mr. Quincunx back from these general considerations to his conversation with James.

“What did you say,” he enquired, “when he asked you about marrying Lacrima, supposing this imaginary kind person were available? Did you tell him you would do it?”

“You mean, was he really jealous?” replied the other, with one of his goblin-like laughs.

“It was a strange question to ask,” pursued Luke. “I can’t imagine how you answered it.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Quincunx, “we know very well what he was driving at. He wanted to sound me. Whatever may be wrong with him he was clever enough to want to sound me. We are all like that! We are all going about the world trying to find out each other’s weakest points, with the idea that it may be useful to us to know them, so as to be able to stick knives into them when we want to.”

“It was certainly rather a strange question considering that he is a bit attracted to Lacrima himself,” remarked Luke. “I should think you were very cautious how you answered.”

“Cautious?” replied Mr. Quincunx. “I don’t believe in caution. Caution is a thing for well-to-do people who have something to lose. I answered him exactly as I would answer anyone. I said I should be a fool not to agree. And so I should. Don’t you think so, Andersen? I should be a fool not to marry, under such circumstances?”

“It depends what your feelings are towards Lacrima,” answered the wily stone-carver.

“Why do you say that, in that tone?” said the recluse sharply. “You know very well what I feel towards Lacrima. Everyone knows. She is the one little streak of romance that the gods have allowed to cross my path. She is my only girl-friend in Nevilton.”

At that moment the two men reached Seven Ashes and the sound of their voices was carried to the cemetery, with the result already narrated.

It will be remarked as an interesting exception to the voluble candour of Mr. Quincunx, that in his conversation with Luke he avoided all mention of Lacrima’s fatal contract with Mr. Romer. He had indeed, on an earlier occasion, approached the outskirts of this affair, in an indirect manner and with much manoeuvring. From what he had hinted then, Luke had formed certain shrewd surmises, in the direction of the truth, but of the precise facts he remained totally ignorant.

The shout for help which interrupted this discussion gave the two men a shock of complete surprise. They were still more surprised, when on entering the cemetery they found James standing over the apparently lifeless form of Ninsy Lintot, her clothes torn and her hair loose and dishevelled. Their astonishment reached its climax when they noticed the sane and rational way in which the stone-carver addressed them. He was in a state of pitiful agitation, but he was no longer mad.

By dint of their united efforts they carried the girl across the field, and laid her down beneath the ash-trees. The fresher air of this more exposed spot had an immediate effect upon her. She breathed heavily, and her fingers, under the caress of James’ hands, lost their rigidity. Across her shadowy white face a quiver passed, and her head moved a little.

“Ninsy! Ninsy, dear!” murmured Andersen as he knelt by her side. By the light of the clear stars, which now filled the sky with an almost tropical splendour, the three men gazing anxiously at her face saw her eyes slowly open and her lips part in a tender recognitory smile.

“Thank God!” cried James, “You are better now, Ninsy, aren’t you? Here is Luke and Mr. Quincunx. They came to find us. They’ll help me to get you safe home.”

The girl murmured some indistinct and broken phrase. She smiled again, but a pathetic attempt she made to lift her hand to her throat proved her helpless weakness. Tenderly, as a mother might, James anticipated her movement, and restored to as natural order as he could her torn and ruffled dress.

At that moment to the immense relief of the three watchers the sound of cart-wheels became audible. The vehicle proved to be a large empty wagon driven by one of Mr. Goring’s men on the way back from an outlying hamlet. They all knew the driver, who pulled up at once at their appeal.

On an extemporized couch at the bottom of the wagon, made of the men’s coats,—Mr. Quincunx being the first to offer his,—they arranged the girl’s passive form as comfortably as the rough vehicle allowed. And then, keeping the horses at a walking-pace, they proceeded along the lane towards Wild Pine.

For some while, as he walked by the cart’s side, his hand upon its well-worn edge, James experienced extreme weariness and lassitude. His legs shook under him and his heart palpitated. The demon which had been driven out of him, had left him, it seemed, like his biblical prototype, exhausted and half-dead. By the time, however, that they reached the corner, where Root-Thatch Lane descends to the village, and Nevil’s Gully commences, the cool air of the night and the slow monotonous movement had restored a considerable portion of his strength.

None of the men, as they went along, had felt in a mood for conversation. Luke had spent his time, naming to himself, with his accustomed interest in such phenomena, the various familiar constellations which shone down upon them between the dark boughs of the Scotch-firs.

The thoughts of Mr. Quincunx were confused and strange. He had fallen into one of his self-condemnatory moods, and like a solemn ghost moving by his side, a grim projection of his inmost identity kept rebuking and threatening him. As with most retired persons, whose lives are passed in an uninterrupted routine, the shock of any unusual or unforseen accident fell upon him with a double weight.

He had been much more impressed by the wild agitation of James, and by the sight of Ninsy’s unconscious and prostrate figure, than anyone who knew only the cynical side of him would have supposed possible. The cynicism of Mr. Quincunx was indeed strictly confined to philosophical conversation. In practical life he was wont to encounter any sudden or tragic occurrence with the unsophisticated sensitiveness of a child. As with many other sages, whose philosophical proclivities are rather instinctive than rational, Mr. Quincunx was liable to curious lapses into the most simple and superstitious misgivings.

The influence of their slow and mute advance, under the majestic heavens, may have had something to do with this reaction, but it is certain that this other Mr. Quincunx—this shadowy companion with no cabbage-leaf under his hat—pointed a most accusing finger at him. Before they reached Nevil’s Gully, the perturbed recluse had made up his mind that, at all costs, he would intervene to prevent this scandalous union of his friend with John Goring. Contract or no contract, he must exert himself in some definite and overt manner to stave off this outrage.

To his startled conscience the sinister figure of Mr. Romer seemed to extend itself, Colossus-like, from the outstretched neck of Cygnus, the heavenly Swan, to the low-hung brilliance of the “lord-star” Jupiter, and accompanying this Satanic shadow across his vision, was a horrible and most realistic image of the frail Italian, struggling in vain against the brutal advances of Mr. Goring. He seemed to see Lacrima, lying helpless, as Ninsy had been lying, but with no protecting forms grouped reassuringly around her.

The sense of the pitiful helplessness of these girlish beings, thrust by an indifferent fate into the midst of life’s brute forces, had pierced his conscience with an indelible stab when first he had seen her prostrate in the cemetery. For a vague transitory moment, he had wondered then, whether his sending her in pursuit of a madman had resulted in a most lamentable tragedy; and though Andersen’s manner had quickly reassured him as it had simultaneously reassured Luke, the original impression of the shock remained.

At that moment, as he helped to lift Ninsy out of the wagon, and carry her through the farm-yard to her father’s cottage, the cynical recluse felt an almost quixotic yearning to put himself to any inconvenience and sacrifice any comfort, if only one such soft feminine creature as he supported now in his arms, might be spared the contact of gross and violating hands.

James Andersen, as well as Mr. Quincunx, remained silent during their return towards the village. In vain Luke strove to lift off from them this oppression of pensive and gentle melancholy. Neither his stray bits of astronomical pedantry, nor his Rabelaisean jests at the expense of a couple of rural amorists they stumbled upon in the overshadowed descent, proved arresting enough to break his companion’s silence.

At the bottom of Root-Thatch Lane Mr. Quincunx separated from the brothers. His way led directly through the upper portion of the village to the Yeoborough road, while that of the Andersens passed between the priory and the church.

The clock in St. Catharine’s tower was striking ten as the two brothers moved along under the churchyard wall. With the departure of Mr. Quincunx James seemed to recover his normal spirits. This recovery was manifested in a way that rejoiced the heart of Luke, so congruous was it with all their old habits and associations; but to a stranger overhearing the words, it would have seemed the reverse of promising.

“Shall we take a glance at the grave?” the elder brother suggested, leaning his elbows on the moss-grown wall. Luke assented with alacrity, and the ancient stones of the wall lending themselves easily to such a proceeding, they both clambered over into the place of tombs.

Thus within the space of forty-eight hours the brothers Andersen had been together in no less than three sepulchral enclosures. One might have supposed that the same destiny that made of their father a kind of modern Old Mortality—less pious, it is true, than his prototype, but not less addicted to invasions of the unprotesting dead—had made it inevitable that the most critical moments of his sons’ lives should be passed in the presence of these mute witnesses.

They crossed over to where the head-stone of their parents’ grave rose, gigantic and imposing in the clear star light, as much larger than the other monuments as the beaver, into which Pau-Puk-Keewis changed himself, was larger than the other beavers. They sat down on a neighbouring mound and contemplated in silence their father’s work. The dark dome of the sky above them, strewn with innumerable points of glittering light, attracted Luke once more to his old astronomical speculations.

“I have an idea,” he said, “that there is more in the influence of these constellations than even the astrologers have guessed. Their method claims to be a scientific one, mathematical in the exactness of its inferences. My feeling about the matter is, that there is something much more arbitrary, much more living and wayward, in the manner in which they work their will upon us. I said ‘constellations,’ but I don’t believe, as a matter of fact, that it is from them at all that the influences come. The natural and obvious thing is that the planets should affect us, and affect us very much in the same way as we affect one another. The ancient races recognized this difference. The fixed stars are named after animals, or inanimate objects, or after powerful, but not more than human, heroes. The planets are all named from immortal gods, and it is as gods,—as wilful and arbitrary gods—that they influence our destinies.”

James Andersen surveyed the large and brilliant star which at that moment hung, like an enormous glow-worm, against the southern slope of Nevilton Mount.

“Some extremely evil planet must have been very active during these last weeks with Lacrima and with me,” he remarked. “Don’t get alarmed, my dear,” he added, noticing the look of apprehension which his brother turned upon him. “I shan’t worry you with any more silly talk. Those voices in my head have quite ceased. But that does not help Lacrima.” He laughed a sad little laugh.

“I suppose,” he added, “no one can help her in this devilish situation,—except that queer fellow who’s just left us. I would let him step over my dead body, if he would only carry her off and fool them all!”

Luke’s mind plunged into a difficult problem. His brother’s wits were certainly restored, and he seemed calm and clear-headed. But was he clear-headed enough to learn the details of the curious little conspiracy which Mr. Taxater’s diplomatic brain had evolved? How would this somewhat ambiguous transaction strike so romantic a nature as his?

Luke hesitated and pondered, the tall dark tower of St. Catharine’s Church affording him but scant inspiration, as it rose above them into the starlit sky. Should he tell him or should he keep the matter to himself, and enter into some new pretended scheme with his brother, to occupy his mind and distract it, for the time being?

So long did he remain silent, pondering this question, that James, observing his absorbed state and concluding that his subtle intelligence was occupied in devising some way out of their imbroglio, gave up all thought of receiving an answer, and moving to a less dew-drenched resting-place, leaned his head against an upright monument and closed his eyes. The feeling that his admired brother was taking Lacrima’s plight so seriously in hand filled him with a reassuring calm, and he had not long remained in his new position before his exhausted senses found relief in sleep.

Left to himself, Luke weighed in his mind every conceivable aspect of the question at stake. Less grave and assured than the metaphysical Mr. Taxater in this matter of striking at evil persons with evil weapons, Luke was not a whit less unscrupulous.

No Quincunx-like visitings of compunction had followed, with him, their rescue of Ninsy. If the scene at Seven Ashes had printed any impression at all upon his volatile mind, it was merely a vague and agreeable sense of how beautiful the girl’s dead-white skin had looked, contrasted with the disturbed masses of her dusky hair. Beyond this, except for a pleasant memory of how lightly and softly she had lain upon his arm, as he helped to carry her across the Wild Pine barton, the occurrence had left him unaffected.

His conscience did not trouble him in the smallest degree with regard to Gladys. According to Luke’s philosophy of life, things in this world resolved themselves into a reckless hand-to-hand struggle between opposing personalities, every one of them seeking, with all the faculties at his disposal, to get the better of the others. It was absurd to stop and consider such illusive impediments as sentiment or honour, when the great, casual, indifferent universe which surrounds us knows nothing of these things!

Out of the depths of this chaotic universe he, Luke Andersen, had been flung. It must be his first concern to sweep aside, as irrelevant and meaningless, any mere human fancies, ill-based and adventitious, upon which his free foot might stumble. To strike craftily and boldly in defence of the person he loved best in the world seemed to him not only natural but commendable. How should he be content to indulge in vague sentimental shilly-shallying, when the whole happiness of his beloved Daddy James was at stake?

The difference between Luke’s attitude to their mutual conspiracy, and that of Mr. Taxater, lay in the fact that to the latter the whole event was merely part of an elaborate, deeply-involved campaign, whose ramifications extended indefinitely on every side; while to the former the affair was only one of those innumerable chaotic struggles that a whimsical world delighted to evoke.

An inquisitive observer might have wondered what purpose Mr. Taxater had in mixing himself up in the affair at all. This question of his fellow-conspirator’s motive crossed, as a matter of fact, Luke’s own mind, as his gaze wandered negligently from the Greater to the Lesser Bear, and from Orion to the Pleiades. He came to the characteristic conclusion that it was no quixotic impulse that had impelled this excellent man, but a completely conscious and definite desire—the desire to add yet one more wanderer to his list of converts to the Faith.

Lacrima was an Italian and a Catholic. United to Mr. Quincunx, might she not easily win over that dreamy infidel to the religion of her fathers? Luke smiled to himself as he thought how little the papal champion could have known the real character of the solitary of Dead Man’s Lane. Sooner might the sea at Weymouth flow inland, and wash with its waves the foot of Leo’s Hill, than this ingrained mystic bow his head under the yoke of dogmatic truth!

After long cogitation with himself, Luke came to the conclusion that it would be wiser, on the whole, to say nothing to his brother of his plan to work out Lacrima’s release by means of her cousin’s betrayal. Having arrived at this conclusion he rose and stretched himself, and glanced at the sleeping James.

The night was warm and windless, but Luke began to feel anxious lest the cold touch of the stone, upon which his brother rested, should strike a chill into his blood. At the same time he was extremely loth to disturb so placid and wholesome a slumber. He laid his hand upon the portentous symbol of mortality which crowned so aggressively his parents’ monument, and looked round him. His vigil had already been interrupted more than once by the voices of late revellers leaving the Goat and Boy. Such voices still recurred, at intermittent moments, followed by stumbling drunken footsteps, but in the intervals the silence only fell the deeper.

Suddenly he observed, or fancied he observed, the aspect of a figure extremely familiar to him, standing patiently outside the inn door. He hurried across the churchyard and looked over the wall. No, he had not been mistaken. There, running her hands idly through the leaves of the great wistaria which clung to the side of the house, stood his little friend Phyllis. She had evidently been sent by her mother,—as younger maids than she were often sent—to assist, upon their homeward journey, the unsteady steps of Bill Santon the carter.

Luke turned and glanced at his brother. He could distinguish his motionless form, lying as still as ever, beyond the dark shape of his father’s formidable tombstone. There was no need to disturb him yet. The morrow was Sunday, and they could therefore be as late as they pleased.

He called softly to the patient watcher. She started violently at hearing his voice, and turning round, peered into the darkness. By degrees she made out his form, and waved her hand to him.

He beckoned her to approach. She shook her head, and indicated by a gesture that she was expecting the appearance of her father. Once more he called her, making what seemed to her, in the obscurity, a sign that he had something important to communicate. Curiosity overcame piety in the heart of the daughter of Bill Santon and she ran across the road.

“Why, you silly thing!” whispered the crafty Luke, “your father’s been gone this half hour! He went a bit of the way home with Sam Lintot. Old Sam will find a nice little surprise waiting for him when he gets back. I reckon he’ll send your father home-along sharp enough.”

It was Luke’s habit, in conversation with the villagers, to drop lightly into many of their provincial phrases, though both he and his brother used, thanks to their mother’s training, as good English as any of the gentlefolk of Nevilton.

The influence of association in the matter of language might have afforded endless interesting matter to the student of words, supposing such a one had been able to overhear the conversations of these brothers with their various acquaintances. Poor Ninsy, for instance, fell naturally into the local dialect when she talked to James in her own house; and assumed, with equal facility, her loved one’s more colourless manner of speech, when addressing him on ground less familiar to her.

As a matter of fact the universal spread of board-school education in that corner of the country had begun to sap the foundations of the old local peculiarities. Where these survived, in the younger generation, they survived side by side with the newer tricks of speech. The Andersens’ girl-friends were, all of them, in reality, expert bilinguists. They spoke the King’s English, and they spoke the Nevilton English, with equal ease, if with unequal expressiveness.

The shrewd fillip to her curiosity, which Luke’s reference to Lintot’s home-coming had given, allured Phyllis into accepting without protest his audacious invention about her father. The probability of such an occurrence seemed sealed with certainty, when turning, at a sign from her friend, she saw, against the lighted window the burly form of the landlord engaged in closing his shutters. It was not the custom, as Phyllis well knew, of this methodical dispenser of Dionysian joys to “shutter up house,” as he called it, until every guest had departed. How could she guess—little deluded maid!—that, stretched upon the floor in the front parlor, stared at by the landlord’s three small sons, was the comatose body of her worthy parent breathing like one of Mr. Goring’s pigs?

“Tain’t no good my waiting here then,” she whispered. “What do ’ee mean by Sam Lintot’s being surprised-like? Be Ninsy taken with her heart again?”

“Let me help you over here,” answered the stone-carver, “that Priory wench was talking, just now, just across yon wall. She’ll be hearing what we say if we don’t move on a bit.”

“Us don’t mind what a maid like her do hear, do us, Luke dear?” whispered the girl in answer. “Give me a kiss, sonny, and let me be getting home-along!”

She stood on tiptoe and raised her hands over the top of the wall. Luke seized her wrists, and retained them in a vicious clutch.

“Put your foot into one of those holes,” he said, “and we’ll soon have you across.”

Unwilling to risk a struggle in such a spot, and not really at all disinclined for an adventure, the girl obeyed him, and after being hoisted up upon the wall, was lifted quickly down on the other side, and enclosed in Luke’s gratified arms. The amorous stone-carver remembered long afterwards the peculiar thrill of almost chaste pleasure which the first touch of her cold cheeks gave him, as she yielded to his embrace.

“Is Nin Lintot bad again?” she enquired, drawing herself away at last.

Luke nodded. “You won’t see her about, this week—or next week—or the week after,” he said. “She’s pretty far gone, this time, I’m afraid.”

Phyllis rendered to her acquaintance’s misfortune the tribute of a conventional murmur.

“Oh, let’s go and look at where they be burying Jimmy Pringle!” she suddenly whispered, in an awe-struck, excited tone.

“What!” cried Luke, “you don’t mean to say he’s dead,—the old man?”

“Where’s ’t been to, then, these last days?” she enquired. “He died yesterday morning and they be going to bury him on Monday. ’Twill be a monstrous large funeral. Can’t be but you’ve heard tell of Jimmy’s being done for.” She added, in an amazed and bewildered tone.

“I’ve been very busy this last week,” said Luke.

“You didn’t seem very busy this afternoon, when you were with Annie and me up at station-field,” she exclaimed, with a mischievous little laugh. Then in a changed voice, “Let’s go and see where they’re going to put him. It’s somewhere over there, under South Wall.”

They moved cautiously hand in hand between the dark grassy mounds, the heavy dew soaking their shoes.

Suddenly Phyllis stopped, her fingers tightening, and a delicious thrill of excitement quivering through her. “There it is. Look!” she whispered.

They advanced a step or two, and found themselves confronted by a gloomy oblong hole, and an ugly heap of ejected earth.

“Oh, how awful it do look, doesn’t it, Luke darling?” she murmured, clinging closely to him.

He put his arm round the girl’s waist, and together, under the vast dome of the starlit sky, the two warm-blooded youthful creatures contemplated the resting-place of the generations.

“It’s queer to think,” remarked Luke pensively, “that just as we stand looking on this, so, when we’re dead, other people will stand over our graves, and we know nothing and care nothing!”

“They dug this out this morning,” said Phyllis, more concerned with the immediate drama than with general meditations of mortality. “Old Ben Fursling’s son did it, and my father helped him in his dinner-hour. They said another hot day like this would make the earth too hard.”

Luke moved forward, stepping cautiously over the dark upturned soil. He paused at the extreme edge of the gaping recess.

“What’ll you give me,” he remarked turning to his companion, “if I climb down into it?”

“Don’t talk like that, Luke,” protested the girl. “’Tisn’t lucky to say them things. I wouldn’t give you nothing. I’d run straight away and leave you.”

The young man knelt down at the edge of the hole, and with the elegant cane he had carried in his hand all that afternoon, fumbled profanely in its dusky depths. Suddenly, to the girl’s absolute horror, he scrambled round, and deliberately let himself down into the pit. She breathed a sigh of unutterable relief, when she observed his head and shoulders still above the level of the ground.

“It’s all right,” he whispered, “they’ve left it half-finished. I suppose they’ll do the rest on Monday.”

“Please get out of it, Luke,” the girl pleaded. “I don’t like to see you there. It make me think you’re standing on Jimmy Pringle.”

Luke obeyed her and emerged from the earth almost as rapidly as he had descended.

When he was once more by her side, Phyllis gave a little half-deliberate shudder of exquisite terror. “Fancy,” she whispered, clinging tightly to him, “if you was to drag me to that hole, and put me down there! I think I should die of fright.”

This conscious playing with her own girlish fears was a very interesting characteristic in Phyllis Santon. Luke had recognized something of the sort in her before, and now he wondered vaguely, as he glanced from the obscurity of Nevilton Churchyard to the brilliant galaxy of luminous splendour surrounding the constellation Pegasus, whether she really wanted him to take her at her word.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of voices at the inn-door. They both held their breath, listening intently.

“There’s father!” murmured the girl. “He must have come back from Lintot’s and be trying to get into the public again! Come and help me over the wall, Luke darling. Only don’t let anybody see us.”

As they hurried across the enclosure, Phyllis whispered in his ears a remark that seemed to him either curiously irrelevant, or inspired in an occult manner by psychic telepathy. She had lately refrained from any reference to Lacrima. The Italian’s friendliness to her under the Hullaway elms had made her reticent upon this subject. On this occasion, however, though quite ignorant of James’ presence in the churchyard, she suddenly felt compelled to say to Luke, in an intensely serious voice:

“If some of you clever ones don’t stop that marriage of Master Goring, there’ll be some more holes dug in this place! There be some things what them above never will allow.”

He helped her over the wall, and watched her overtake her staggering parent, who had already reeled some distance down the road. Then he returned to his brother and roused him from his sleep. James was sulky and irritable at being so brusquely restored to consciousness, but the temperature of his mind appeared as normal and natural as ever.

They quitted the place without further conversation, and strode off in silence up the village street. The perpendicular slabs of the crowded head stones, and the yet more numerous mounds that had neither name nor memory, resumed their taciturn and lonely watch.

To no human eyes could be made visible the poor thin shade that was once Jimmy Pringle, as it swept, bat-like, backwards and forwards, across the dew-drenched grass. But the shade itself, endowed with more perception than had been permitted to it while imprisoned in the “muddy vesture” of our flesh and blood, became aware, in its troubled flight, of a singular spiritual occurrence.

Rising from the base of that skull-crowned monument, two strange and mournful phantoms flitted waveringly, like huge ghost-moths, along the protruding edge of the church-roof. Two desolate and querulous voices, like the voices of conflicting winds through the reeds of some forlorn salt-marsh, quivered across the listening fields.

“It is strong and unconquered—the great heart of my Hill,” one voice wailed out. “It draws them. It drives them. The earth is with it; the planets are for it, and all their enchantments cannot prevail against it!”

“The leaves may fall and the trees decay,” moaned the second voice, “but where the sap has once flowed, Love must triumph.”

The fluttering shadow of Jimmy Pringle fled in terror from these strange sounds, and took refuge among the owls in the great sycamore of the Priory meadow. A falling meteorite swept downwards from the upper spaces of the sky and lost itself behind the Wild Pine ridge.

“Strength and cunning,” the first voice wailed forth again, “alone possess their heart’s desire. All else is vain and empty.”

“Love and Sacrifice,” retorted the other, “outlast all victories. Beyond the circle of life they rule the darkness, and death is dust beneath their feet.”

Crouched on a branch of his protecting sycamore, the thin wraith of Jimmy Pringle trembled and shook like an aspen-leaf. A dumb surprise possessed the poor transmuted thing to find itself even less assured of palpable and familiar salvation, than when, after drinking cider at the Boar’s Head in Athelston, he had dreamed dreams at Captain Whiffley’s gate.

“The Sun is lord and god of the earth,” wailed the first voice once more. “The Sun alone is master in the end. Lust and Power go forth with him, and all flesh obeys his command.”

“The Moon draws more than the tides,” answered the second voice. “In the places of silence where Love waits, only the Moon can pass; and only the Moon can hear the voice of the watchers.”

From the red planet, high up against the church-tower, to the silver planet low down among the shadowy trees, the starlit spaces listened mutely to these antiphonal invocations. Only the distant expanse of the Milky Way, too remote in its translunar gulfs to heed these planetary conflicts, shimmered haughtily down upon the Wood and Stone of Nevilton—impassive, indifferent, unconcerned.