The incredibly halcyon June which had filled the lanes and meadows of Nevilton that summer with such golden weather, gave place at last to July; and with July came tokens of a change.

The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn with their little lines of brown mown grass waiting its hour of “carrying,” but the larger number of the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and yet curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when they have been shorn of their first harvest. The corn in the arable-lands was beginning to stand high; wheat and barley varying their alternate ripening tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the diaphanous glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the other. In the hedges, rag-wort, knapweed and scabious had completely replaced wild-rose and elder-blossom; and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds, loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. Even the latest-sprouting among the trees carried now the full heavy burden, dark and monotonous, of the summer’s prime; and the sharp, dry intermittent chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more flute-like cries of the earlier-nesting birds.

The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, with their thick entangled undergrowth, were less pleasant to walk in than they had been. Tall rank growths choked the wan remnants of the season’s first prime; and beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the dry, hard-trodden paths lost their furtive enchantment. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the under-shadows, was no more now than a gross mass of tarnished leaves. Enchanter’s night-shade took the place of pink-campion; only to yield, in its turn, to viper’s bugloss and flea-bane.

As the shy gods of the year’s tender birth receded before these ranker maturings, humanity became more prominent. Print-frocked maidens assisted the sheep in treading the slopes of Leo’s Hill into earthy grassless patches. Bits of dirty paper and the litter of careless picnickers strewed the most shadowy recesses. Smart youths flicked town-bought canes in places where, a few weeks before, the squirrel had gambolled undisturbed, and the wood-pecker had deepened the magical silence by his patent labour. Where recently, amid shadowy moss “soft as sleep,” the delicate petals of the fragile wood-sorrel had breathed untroubled in their enchanted aisles of leafy twilight, one found oneself reading, upon torn card-board boxes, highly-coloured messages to the Human Race from energetic Tradesmen. July had replaced June. The gods of Humanity had replaced the gods of Nature; and the interlude between hay-harvest and wheat-harvest had brought the dog-star Sirius into his diurnal ascendance.

The project of Lacrima’s union with Mr. John Goring remained, so to speak, “in the air.” The village assumed it as a certainty; Mr. Quincunx regarded it as a probability; and Mr. Goring himself, enjoying his yearly session of agreeable leisure, meditated upon it day and night.

Lacrima had fallen into a curious lassitude with regard to the whole matter. In these July days, especially now that the sky was overcast by clouds and heavy rains seemed imminent, she appeared to lose all care or interest in her own life. Her mood followed the mood of the weather. If some desperate deluge of disaster was brooding in the distance, she felt tempted to cry out, “Let it fall!”

Mr. Quincunx’s feelings on the subject remained a mystery to her. He neither seemed definitely to accept her sacrifice, nor to reject it. He did not really—so she could not help telling herself—visualize the horror of the thing, as it affected her, in any substantial degree. He often made a joke of it; and kept quoting cynical and worldly suggestions, from the lips of Luke Andersen.

On the other hand, both from Mr. Romer and the farmer, she received quiet, persistent and inexorable pressure; though to do the latter justice, he made no further attempts to treat her roughly or familiarly.

She had gone so far once—in a mood of panic-stricken aversion, following upon a conversation with Gladys—as actually to walk to the vicarage gate, with the definite idea of appealing to Vennie; but it chanced that in place of Vennie she had observed Mrs. Seldom moving among her flower-beds, and the grave austerity of the aristocratic old lady had taken all resolution from her and made her retrace her steps.

It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear of Gladys had grown to dimensions bordering upon monomania. The elder girl at once hypnotized and paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, her elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian to such helpless misery, that any change—even the horror of this marriage—assumed the likeness of a desirable relief.

It is also true that by gradual degrees,—for women, however little prone to abstract thought, are quick to turn the theories of those they love into living practice,—she had come to regard the mere physical terror of this momentous plunge as a less insurmountable barrier than she had felt at first. Without precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx had really, in a measure—particularly since he himself had come to frequent the society of Luke Andersen—achieved what might have conventionally been called the “corruption” of Lacrima’s mind. She found herself on several occasions imagining what she would really feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory duties, she were slipping off to meet her friend in Camel’s Cover or Badger’s Bottom.

When the suggestion had been first made to her of this monstrous marriage, it had seemed nothing short of a sentence of death, and beyond the actual consummation of it, she had never dreamed of looking. But all this had now imperceptibly changed. Many an evening as she sat with her work by Mrs. Romer’s side, watching Gladys and her father play cards, the thought came over her that she might just as well enjoy the comparative independence of having her own house and her own associations—even though the price of them were the society of such a lump of clay—as live this wretched half-life without hope or aim.

Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing—a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone—the mother always—has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything—from the mother.

Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night-fall into Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx, with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated—in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no very difficult task to deceive,—in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown. His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded afterwards, more deeply than she would have cared to confess, her hours of dreamy solitude.

Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an antinomian path—at least in its wayward fancies—than it would have been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith.

While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend—especially now they had been fortified and directed by the insidious Luke—gave her intelligence many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience was besieged and threatened. It was indeed a queer rÔle—this, which fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx—the rÔle of undermining the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage—but it was one for which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him.

Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of affairs they would have condemned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale manner. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely questionable whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified.

A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated into the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion—if it were an illusion—that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clairvoyant might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of Mr. Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.

The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this ambiguous and evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx reduced the more heroic and romantic aspect of the girl’s sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. She was brought to the point of losing all interest in her own fate and of simply relapsing upon the tide of events.

It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Romer had desired to bring her. When she had first attracted him, and had fallen into his hands, there had been certain psychological contests between them, in which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged victorious. It was the rankling memory of these contests—contests spiritual rather than material—which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his longing to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul. This corruption, this humiliation had been long in coming. It had seemed out of his own power and out of the power of his feline daughter to bring it about; but this felicitous plan of using the girl’s own friend to assist her moral disintegration appeared to have changed the issue very completely.

Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became more and more certain that her integral soul, the inmost fortress of her self-respect, was yielding inch by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was drifting upon the tide.

It might have been a matter of surprise to some ill-judging psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, of the quarry-owner’s type, should ever have entered upon a struggle apparently so unequal and unimportant as that for the mere integrity of a solitary girl’s spirit. Such a judgment would display little knowledge of the darker possibilities of human character. Resistance is resistance, from whatever quarter it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive instincts of a born master of men as the most obdurate of commercial rivals.

There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, which, when once they have been encountered, remain indelibly in the memory as a challenge and a defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out in their defeat. It matters nothing that such oppositions should spring from weak or trifling quarters. We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled; and we cannot recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, until, like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drowned completely the barricades that defied it. It matters nothing if at the beginning, what we were thwarted by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a feather in the breeze. The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition—met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge.

It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill—a defeat into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage—had been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane.

It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past—in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are—as is well-known, many instances of this unfathomable conflict between certain human types—types that seem to find one another, that seem to be drawn to one another, by some preordained necessity in the occult influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in regard to such a conflict, that on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other weakness and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws.

It is a case of what a true initiate into the secrets of our terrestrial drama might entitle Planetary Opposition. By some hidden law of planetary opposition, this frail child of the Apennine ridges was destined to provoke, to an apparently quite unequal struggle, this formidable schemer from the money-markets of London.

In these strange pre-natal attractions and repulsions between men and women, the mere conventional differences of rank and social importance are as nothing and less than nothing.

Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us all backwards and forwards; and if under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of the Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to the humiliation of his daughter’s companion than to his election to the British Parliament, one can only remember that both of them—the strong and the weak—were merely puppets and pawns of elemental forces, compared with which he, as well as she, was as the chaff before the wind.

It was one of the peculiarities of this Nevilton valley to draw to itself, as we have already hinted, and focus strangely in itself, these airy and elemental oppositions. To rise above the clash of the Two Mythologies on this spot, with all their planetary “auxiliar gods,” one would have had to ascend incredibly high into that star-sown space above—perhaps so high, that the whole solar system, rushing madly through the ether towards the constellation of Hercules, would have shown itself as less than a cluster of wayward fireflies. From a height as supreme as this, the difference between Mortimer Romer and Lacrima Traffio would have been less than the difference between two summer-midges transacting their affairs on the edge of a reed in Auber Lake.

Important or unimportant, however, the struggle went on; and, as July advanced, seemed to tend more and more to Mr. Romer’s advantage. Precisely what he desired to happen was indeed happening—Lacrima’s soul was disintegrating; her powers of resistance were diminishing; and a reckless carelessness about her personal fate was taking the place of her old sensitive apprehensions.

Another important matter went well at this time for Mr. Romer. His daughter became formally engaged to the wealthy American. Dangelis had been pressing her, for many weeks, to come to some definite decision, between himself and Lord Tintinhull’s heir, and she had at last made up her mind and given him her promise.

The Romers were enchanted at this new development. Mrs. Romer had always disliked the thought of having to enter into closer relations with the aristocracy—relations for which she was so obviously unsuited; and Ralph Dangelis fitted in exactly with her idea of what her son-in-law should be.

Mr. Romer, too, found in Dangelis just the sort of son he had always longed for. He had quite recognized, by this time, that the “artistic” tastes of the American and his unusual talent interfered in no way with the possession of a very shrewd intellectual capacity. Dangelis had indeed all the qualities that Mr. Romer most admired. He was strong. He was clever. He was an entertaining companion. He was at once very formidable and very good-tempered. And he was immensely rich.

It would have annoyed him to see Gladys dominate a man of this sort with her capricious ways. But he had not the remotest fear that she would dominate this citizen of Ohio. Dangelis would pet her and spoil her and deluge her with money, but keep a firm and untroubled hand over her; and that exactly suited Mr. Romer’s wishes. The man’s wealth would also be an immense help to himself in his financial undertakings. Together they would be able to engineer colossal and world-shaking schemes.

It was a satisfaction, too, to think that, when he died, his loved quarries on Leo’s Hill and his historic Leonian House should fall into the hands, not of these Ilchesters and Ilminsters and Evershots—families whose pretensions he hated and derided—but of an honest descendant of plain business men of his own class.

It was Mrs. Romer, and not her husband, who uttered a lament that the House after their death should no longer be the property of one of their own name. She proposed that Gladys’ American should be induced to change his name. But Mr. Romer would hear nothing of this. His system was the old imperial Roman system, of succession by adoption. The man who could deal with the Legions, the man who was strong enough to suppress strikes on Leo’s Hill, and cope successfully with such rascals as this voluble Wone, was the man to inherit Nevilton! Be his patronymic what you please, such a man was CÆsar. Himself, a new-comer, risen from nothing, and contemptuous of all tradition, it had constantly been a matter of serious annoyance to him that the wealth he had amassed should only go to swell the pride of these fatuous landed gentry. It delighted him to think that Gladys’ children—the future inheritors of his labour—should be, on their father’s side also, from new and untraditional stock. It gave him immense satisfaction to think of disappointing Lord Tintinhull, who no doubt had long ago told his friends how sad it was that his son had got entangled with that girl at Nevilton; but how nice it was that Nevilton House should in the future take its proper place in the county.

There was one cloud on Mr. Romer’s horizon at this moment, and that cloud was composed of vapours spun from the brain of his parliamentary rival, the eloquent Methodist.

Mr. Wone had long been at work among the Leo’s Hill quarry-men, encouraging them to strike. Until the second week in July his efforts had been fruitless; but with the change in the weather to which we have referred, the strike came. It had already lasted some seven or eight days, when a Saturday arrived which had been selected, several months before, for a great political gathering on the summit of Leo’s Hill. This was a meeting of radicals and socialists to further the cause of Mr. Wone’s campaign.

Leo’s Hill had been, for many generations, the site of such local gatherings. These gatherings were not confined to political demonstrators. They were usually attended by circus-men and other caterers to proletarian amusement; and were often quite as lively, in their accompaniments of feasting and festivity, as any country fair.

The actual speaking took place at the extreme northern end of the hill, where there was a singular and convenient feature, lending itself to such assemblies, in the formation of the ground. This was the grassy outline, still emphasizing quite distinctly its ancient form, of the military Roman amphitheatre attached to the camp. Locally the place was known as “the Frying-pan”, from its marked and grotesque resemblance to that utensil; but no base culinary appellation, issue of Anglo-Saxon unimaginativeness, could conceal the formidable classic moulding of its well-known shape—the shape of the imperial colisseum.

Between the Frying-pan and the southern side of the hill, where the bulk of the quarries were, rose a solitary stone building. One hardly expected the presence of such a building in such a place, for it was a considerable-sized inn; but the suitableness of the grassy expanses of the ancient camp for all manner of tourist-jaunts accounted for its erection; and doubtless it served a good purpose in softening with interludes of refreshment the labours of the quarry-men.

It was the presence of this admirable tavern so near the voice of the orator, that led Mr. Romer, himself, to stroll, on that Saturday, in the direction of his rival’s demonstration. Though the more considerable of his quarries were at the southern end of the hill, certain new excavations, in the success of which he took exceptional interest, had been latterly made in its very centre, and within a stone’s throw of the tavern-door. The great cranes, used in this new invasion, stood out against the sky from the highest part of the hill, and assumed, especially at sunset, when their shape was rendered most emphatic, the form of enormous compasses, planted there by some gigantic architectural hand.

It was in relation to these new works that Mr. Romer, towards the close of the afternoon, found himself advancing along the narrow path that led, between clumps of bracken and furze-bushes, from the most westward of his woods to the hill’s base. Mr. Lickwit had informed him that there was talk, among some of the more intransigent of the Yeoborough socialists, about destroying these cranes. Objections had been brought against them, in recent newspaper articles, on purely Æsthetic grounds. It was said they disfigured the classic outline of the hill, and interfered with a landmark which had been a delight to every eye for unnumbered ages.

It was hardly to be supposed that the more official of the supporters of Mr. Wone would condone any such outbreak. It was unlikely that Wone himself would do so. The “Christian Candidate,” as his Methodist friends called him, was in no way a man of violence. But the fact that there had been this pseudo-public criticism of the works from an unpolitical point of view might lend colour to any sort of scandal. There were plenty of bold spirits among the by-streets of Yeoborough who would have loved nothing better than to send Mr. Romer’s cranes toppling over into a pit, and indeed it was the sort of adventure which would draw all the more restless portion of the meeting’s audience. The possibility was the more threatening because the presence of this kind of general fair attracted to the hill all manner of heterogeneous persons quite unconnected with the locality.

But what really influenced Mr. Romer in making his own approach to the spot, was the neighbourhood of the Half Moon. Where there was drink, he argued, people would get drunk; and where people got drunk, anything might happen. He had instituted Mr. Lickwit to remain on guard at the eastern works; and he had written to the superintendent of police suggesting the advisability of special precautions. But he felt nervous and ill at ease as he listened, from his Nevilton terrace, to the distant shouts and clamour carried to him on the west wind; and true to his Napoleonic instincts, he proceeded, without informing anyone of his intention, straight to the zone of danger.

The afternoon was very hot, though there was no sun. The wind blew in threatening gusts, and the quarry-owner noticed that the distant Quantock Moors were overhung with a dark bank of lowering clouds. It was one of those sinister days that have the power of taking all colour and all interest out of the earth’s surface. The time of the year lent itself gloomily to this sombre unmasking. The furze-bushes looked like dead things. Many of them had actually been burnt in some wanton conflagration; and their prickly branches carried warped and blighted seeds. The bracken, near the path, had been dragged and trodden. Here and there its stalks protruded like thin amputated arms. The elder-bushes, caught in the wind, showed white and metallic, as if all their leaves had been dipped in some brackish water. All the trees seemed to have something of this dull, whitish glare, which did not prevent them from remaining, in the recesses of their foliage, as drearily dark as the dark dull soil beneath them. The grass of the fields had a look congruous with the rest of the scene; a look as if it had been one large velvety pall, drawn over the whole valley.

In the valley itself, along the edges of this grassy hall, the tall clipped elm-trees stood like mourning sentinels bowing towards their dead. Drifting butterflies, principally of the species known as the “Lesser Heath” and the “Meadow-Brown,” whirled past his feet as he walked, in troubled and tarnished helplessness. Here and there a weak dilapidated currant-moth, the very epitome of surrender to circumstance, tried in vain to arrest its enforced flight among the swaying stalks of grey melancholy thistles, the only living things who seemed to find the temper of the day congenial with their own.

When he reached the base of the hill, Mr. Romer was amazed at the crowd of people which the festivity had attracted to the place. He had heard them passing down the roads all day from the seclusion of his garden, and to judge by such vehicles as he had secured a glimpse of from the entrance to his drive, many of them must have come from miles away. But he had never expected a crowd like this. It seemed to cover the whole northern side of the hill, swaying to and fro, like some great stream of voracious maggots, in the body of a dead animal.

Round the cranes, in the centre of the hill, the crowd seemed especially thick. He made out the presence there of several large caravans, and he heard the music of a merry-go-round from that direction. This latter sound, in its metallic and ferocious gaiety, seemed especially adapted to the character of the scene. It seemed like the very voice of some savage Dionysian helot-feast, celebrated in defiance of all constituted authority. It was such music as Caliban would have loved.

Unwilling to arouse unnecessary anger by making his presence known, while there was no cause, Mr. Romer left the Half Moon on his right, and crossing the brow of the hill diagonally, by a winding path that encircled the grassy hollows of innumerable ancient quarries, arrived at the foot of an immense circular tumulus which dominated the whole scene. This indeed was the highest point of Leo’s Hill, and from its summit one looked far away towards the Bristol Channel in one direction, and far away towards the English Channel in another. It was, as it were, the very navel and pivot of that historic region. From this spot one obtained a sort of birds-eye view of the whole surface of Leo’s Hill.

Here Mr. Romer found himself quite alone, and from here, with hands clasped behind him, he surveyed the scene with a grave satiric smile. He could see his new works with the immense cranes reaching into the sky above them. He could see the swaying crowd round the amphitheatre at the extreme corner of the promontory; and he could see, embosomed in trees to the left of Nevilton’s Mount, a portion of his own Elizabethan dwelling.

Mr. Romer felt strong and confident as he looked down on all these things. He always seemed to renew the forces of his being when he visited this grass-covered repository of his wealth and influence. Leo’s Hill suited his temper, and he felt as though he suited the temper of Leo’s Hill. Between the man who exploited the stone, and the great reservoir of the stone he exploited, there seemed an illimitable affinity.

He looked down with grim and humorous contempt at the noisy crowd thus invading his sacred domain. They might harangue their hearts out,—those besotted sentimentalists,—he could well afford to let them talk! They might howl and dance and feast and drink, till they were as dazed as Comus’ rabble,—he could afford to let them shout! Probably Mr. Wone, the “Christian Candidate,” was even at that moment, making his great final appeal for election at the hands of the noble, the free, the enlightened constituency of Mid-Wessex.

Romer felt an immense wave of contempt surge through his veins for this stream of fatuous humanity as it swarmed before his eyes like an army of disturbed ants. How little their anger or their affection mattered to him—or mattered to the world at large! He would have liked to have seized in his hands some vast celestial torch and suffocated them all in its smoke, as one would choke out a wasp’s nest. Their miserable little pains and pleasures were not worth the trouble Nature had taken in giving them the gift of life. Dead or alive—happy or unhappy—they were not deserving of any more consideration than a cloud of gnats that one brushed away from one’s face.

The master of Leo’s Hill drew a deep breath and listened to the screams of the merry-go-round. Something in the strident machine made him think of hymn-singing and mob-religion. This Religion of Sentiment and Self-Pity with which they cloak their weakness and their petty rancour—what is it, he thought, but an excuse of escaping from the necessity of being strong and fearless and hard and formidable? It is easier—so much easier—to draw back, and go aside, and deal in paltry subterfuges and sneaking jealousies, veneered over with hypocritical unction, than to strike out and pursue one’s own way drastically and boldly.

He folded his arms and frowned. What is it, he muttered to himself, this hidden Force, this Power, this God, to which they raise their vague appeals against the proud, clear, actual domination of natural law and unscrupulous strength? Is there really some other element in the world, some other fact, from which they can draw support and encouragement? There cannot be! He looked at the lowering sky above him, and at the grey thistles and little patches of thyme under his feet. All was solid, real, unyielding. There was no gap, no open door, in the stark surface of things, through which such a mystery might enter.

He found himself vaguely wondering whose grave this had originally been, this great flat tumulus, upon which he stood and hated the mob of men. There was a burnt circle in the centre of it, with blackened cinders. The place had been used for some recent national rejoicing, and they had raised a bonfire here. He supposed that there must have been a much more tremendous bonfire in the days when—perhaps before the Romans—this mound was raised to celebrate some savage chieftain. He wondered whether, in his life-time, this long-buried, long-forgotten one had stood, even as he stood now, and cried aloud to the Earth and the Sky in sick loathing of his wretched fellow-animals.

He humorously speculated whether this man also, this ancient challenger of popular futility, had been driven to strange excesses by the provocative resistance of some feeble girl, making her mute appeals to the suppressed conscience in him, and calling in the help of tender compassionate gods? Had they softened this buried chieftain’s heart, these gods of slavish souls and weak wills, before he went down into darkness? Or had he defied them to the last and died lonely, implacable, contemptuous?

The quarry-owner’s ears began to grow irritated at last by these raucous metallic sounds and by the laughter and the shouting. It was so precisely as if this foolish crowd were celebrating, in drunken ecstasy, a victory won over him, and over all that was clear-edged, self-possessed, and effectual, in this confused world. He struck off the heads of some of the grey thistles with his cane, and wished they had been the heads of the Christian Candidate and his oratorical associates.

Presently his attention was excited by a tremendous hubbub at the northern extremity of the hill. The crowd seemed to have gone mad. They cheered again and again, and seemed vociferating some popular air or some marching-song. He could almost catch the words of this. The curious thing was that he could not help in his heart dallying with the strange wish that in place of being the man at the top, he had been one of these men at the bottom. How differently he would have conducted the affair. He knew, from his dealings with the country families, how deep this revolutionary rage with established tradition could sink. He sympathized with it himself. He would have loved to have flung the whole sleek structure of society into disorder, and to have shaken these feeble rulers out of their snug seats. But this Wone had not the spirit of a wood-louse! Had he—Romer—been at this moment the arch-revolutionary, in place of the arch-tyrant, what a difference in method and result! Did they think, these idiots, that eloquent words and appeals to Justice and Charity would change the orbits of the planets?

He strode impatiently to the edge of the tumulus. Yes, there was certainly something unusual going forward. The crowd was swaying outwards, was scattering and wavering. Men were running to and fro, tossing their hats in the air and shouting. At last there really was a definite event. The whole mass of the crowd seemed to be seized simultaneously with a single impulse. It began to move. It began to move in the direction of his new quarries. The thrill of battle seized the heart of the master of Nevilton with an exultant glow. So they were really going to attempt something—the incapable sheep! This was the sort of situation he had long cried out for. To have an excuse to meet them, face to face, in a genuine insurrection, this was worthier of a man’s energy than quarrelling with wretched Social Meetings.

He ran down the side of the tumulus and hastened to meet the approaching mob. By leaving the path and skirting the edge of several disused quarries he should, he thought, easily be able to reach his new works long before they did. The tall cranes served as a guide. To his astonishment he found, on approaching his objective, that the mob had swerved, and were now streaming forward in a long wavering line, between the Half Moon tavern and the lower slopes, towards the southern end of the hill.

“Ah!” he muttered under his breath, “this is more serious! They are going to attack the offices.”

By this time, the bulk of the crowd had got so far that it would have been impossible for him to intercept or anticipate them.

Among the more cautious sight-seers who, mixed with women and children, were trailing slowly in the rear, he was quite certain he made out the figures of Wone and his fellow-politicians. “Just like him,” he thought. “He has stirred them up with his speeches and now he is hiding behind them! I expect he will be sneaking off home presently.” The figure he supposed to be that of the Christian Candidate did, as a matter of fact, shortly after this, detach himself from the rest of his group and retire quietly and discreetly towards the path leading to Nevilton.

Romer retraced his steps as rapidly as he could. He repassed the tumulus, crossed a somewhat precipitous bank between two quarries, and emerged upon the road that skirts the western brow of the hill. This road he followed at an impetuous pace, listening, as he advanced, for any sound of destruction and violence. When he arrived at the open level between the two largest of his quarries he found himself at the edge of a surging and howling mob. He could see over their heads the low slate roofs of his works, and he could see that someone, mounted on a large slab of stone, was haranguing the people near him, but more than this it was impossible to make out and it was extremely difficult to get any closer. The persons on the outskirts of the crowd were evidently strangers, and with no interest in the affair at all beyond excited curiosity, for he heard them asking one another the most vague and confused questions.

Presently he observed the figure of a policeman rise behind the man upon the stone and jerk him to the ground. This was followed by a bewildering uproar. Clenched hands were raised in the air, and wild cries were audible. He fancied he caught the sound of the syllable “fire.”

Romer was seized with a mad lust of contest. He struggled desperately to force his way through to the front, but the entangled mass of agitated, perspiring people proved an impassable barrier.

He began hastily summing up in his mind what kind of destruction they could achieve that would cause him any serious annoyance. He remembered with relief that all the more delicate pieces of carved work were down at Nevilton Station. They could do little damage to solid blocks of stone, which were all they would find inside those wooden sheds. They might injure the machinery and the more fragile of the tools, but they could hardly do even that, unless they were aided by some of his own men. He wondered if his own men—the men on strike—were among them, or if the rioters were only roughs from Yeoborough. Let them burn the sheds down! He did not value the sheds. They could be replaced tomorrow. Their utmost worth was hardly the price of a dozen bottles of champagne. It gave him a thrill of grim satisfaction to think of the ineffectualness of this horde of gesticulating two-legged creatures, making vain assaults upon slabs of impervious rock. Man against Stone! It was a pleasant and symbolic struggle. And it could only have one issue.

Finding it impossible to move forward, and not caring to be observed by anyone who knew him hemmed in in this ridiculous manner among staring females and jocose youths, Romer edged himself backwards, and, hot and breathless, got clear of the crowd.

The physical exhaustion of this effort—for only a man of considerable strength could have advanced an inch through such a dense mass—had materially diminished his thirst for a personal encounter. He smiled to himself to think how humorous it would be if he could, even now, overtake the escaping Mr. Wone, and offer his rival restorative refreshment, in the cool shades of his garden! For the prime originals of this absurd riot to be drinking claret-cup upon a grassy lawn, while the misled and deluded populace were battering their heads against the stony heart of Leo’s Hill, struck Mr. Romer as a curiously suitable climax to the days’ entertainment. Hardly thinking of what he did, he clambered up the side of a steep bank, where a group of children were playing, and looked across the valley. Surely that solitary black figure retreating so furtively, so innocently, along the path towards the wood, could be no one but the Christian Candidate!

Mr. Romer burst out laughing. The discreet fugitive looked so absurdly characteristic in his shuffling retirement, that he felt for the moment as if the whole incident were a colossal musical-comedy farce. A puff of smoke above the heads of the crowd, and a smell of burning, made him serious again. “Damn them!” he muttered. “They shall not get off without anything being done.”

From his present position he was able to discern how he could get round to the sheds. On their remoter side he saw that the crowd had considerably thinned away. He made out the figures of some policemen there, bending, it appeared, over something upon the ground.

It did not take him long to descend from his post, to skirt the western side of the quarries, and to reach the spot. He found that the object upon the ground was no other than his manager Lickwit, gasping and pallid, with a streak of blood running down his face. From the policemen he learnt that an entrance had been forced into the sheds, and the more violent of the rioters—the ones who had laid Mr. Lickwit low—were now regaling themselves in that shelter upon the contents of a barrel of cider, whose hiding-place someone had unearthed. The fire was already trampled upon and extinguished. He learnt further that a messenger had been sent to summon more police to the spot, and that it was to be hoped that the revellers within the shed would continue their opportune tippling until their arrival. This, however, was not what fate intended. Reeling and shouting, the half-a-dozen joyous Calibans emerged from their retreat and proceeded to address the people, all vociferating at the same time, and each interrupting the other. The more official and respectable among the politicians had either retired altogether from the scene or were cautiously watching it, from the safe obscurity of the general crowd, and the situation around the stone-works was completely in the hands of the rioters.

Mr. Romer, having done what he could for the comfort of his manager, who was really more frightened than hurt, turned fiercely upon the aggressors. He commanded the two remaining policemen—the third was helping Lickwit from the scene—to arrest on the spot these turbulent ruffians, who were now engaged in laying level with the ground a tool-shed adjoining the one they had entered. They were striking at the corner-beams of this erection with picks and crow-bars. Others among the crowd, pushing their less courageous neighbours forward, began throwing stones at the policemen, uttering, as they did so, yells and threats and abusive insults.

The mass of the people behind, hearing these yells, and yielding to a steady pressure from the rear, where more and more inquisitive persons kept arriving, began to sway ominously onward, crowding more and more thickly around the open space, where Mr. Romer stood, angrily regarding them.

The policemen kept looking anxiously towards the Half Moon where the road across the hill terminated. They were evidently very nervous and extremely desirous of the arrival of re-enforcements. No re-enforcements coming, however, and the destruction of property continuing, they were forced to act; and drawing their staves, they made a determined rush upon the men attacking the shed. Had these persons not been already half-drunk, the emissaries of the law would have come off badly. As it was, they only succeeded in flinging the rioters back a few paces. The whole crowd moved forward and a volley of stones and sticks compelled the officials to retreat. In their retreat they endeavoured to carry Mr. Romer with them, assuring him, in hurried gasps, that his life itself was in danger. “They’ll knock your head off, sir—the scoundrels! Phil Wone has seen you.”

The pale son of Mr. Wone had indeed pushed his way to the front. He at once began an impassioned oration.

“There he is—the devil himself!” he shouted, panting with excitement. “Do for him, friends! Throw him into one of his own pits—the bloodsucker, the assassin, the murderer of the people!”

Wild memories of historic passages rushed through the young anarchist’s brain. He waved his arms savagely, goading on his companions. His face was livid. Mr. Romer moved towards him, his head thrown back and a contemptuous smile upon his face.

The drunken ring leaders, recognizing their hereditary terror—the local magistrate—reeled backwards in sudden panic. Others in the front line of the crowd, knowing Mr. Romer by sight, stood stock still and gaped foolishly or tried to shuffle off unobserved. A few strangers who were there, perceiving the presence of a formidable-looking gentleman, assumed at once that he was Lord Tintinhull or the Earl of Glastonbury and made frantic efforts to escape. The crowd at the back, conscious that a reverse movement had begun, became alarmed. Cries were raised that the “military” had come. “They are going to fire!” shouted one voice, and several women screamed.

Philip Wone lifted up his voice again, pointing with outstretched arm at his enemy, and calling upon the crowd to advance.

“The serpent!—the devil-fish!—the bread-stealer!—the money-eater!” he yelled. “Cast him into his own pit, bury him in his own quarries!”

It was perhaps fortunate for Mr. Romer at that moment that his adversary was this honest youth in place of a more hypocritical leader. An English crowd, even though sprinkled with a leaven of angry strikers, only grows puzzled and bewildered when it hears its enemy referred to as “devil-fish” and “assassin.”

The enemy at this moment took full advantage of their bewilderment. He deliberately drew out his cigarette-case and lighting a cigarette, made a gesture as if driving back a flock of sheep. The crowd showed further signs of panic. But the young anarchist was not to be silenced.

“Look round you, friends,” he shouted. “Here is this man defying you on the very spot where you work for him day and night, where your descendants will work for his descendants day and night! What are you afraid of? This man did not make this hill bring forth stone, though it is stone, instead of bread, that he would willingly give your children!”

Mr. Romer gave a sign to the policemen and approached a step nearer. The cider-drinkers had already moved off. The crowd began to melt away.

“The very earth,” went on the young man, “cries aloud to you to put an end to this tyranny! Do you realize that this is the actual place where in one grand revolt the men of Mid Wessex rose against the—”

He was interrupted by a man behind him—a poacher from an outlying hamlet. “Chuck it, Phil Wone! Us knows all about this ’ere job.”

Mr. Romer raised his hand. The policemen seized the young man by the arms, one on either side. He seemed hardly to notice them, and went on in a loud resonant voice that rang across the valley.

“It will end! It will end, this evil day! Already the new age is beginning. These robbers of the people had better make haste with their plundering, for the hour is approaching! Where is your priest?”—he struggled violently with his captors, turning towards the rapidly retreating crowd, “where is your vicar,—your curer of souls? He talks to you of submission, and love, and obedience, and duty. What does this man care for these things? It is under this talk of “love” that you are betrayed! It is under this talk of “duty,” that your children have the bread taken from their mouths! But the hour will come;—yes, you may smile,” he addressed himself directly to Mr. Romer now, “but you will not smile for long. Your fate is already written down! It is as sure as this rain,—as sure as this storm!”

He was silent, and making no further resistance, let himself be carried off by the two officials.

The rain he spoke of was indeed beginning. Heavy drops, precursors of what seemed likely to be a tropical deluge, fell upon the broken wood-work, upon the half-burnt bracken, upon the slabs of Leonian stone, and upon the trampled grass. They also fell upon Mr. Romer’s silver match-box as he selected another cigarette of his favourite brand, and walked slowly and smilingly away in the direction of Nevilton.