“I see,” said Luke Andersen to his brother, as they sat at breakfast in the station-master’s kitchen, about a fortnight after the riot on Leo’s Hill, “I see that Romer has withdrawn his charge against young Wone. It seems that the magistrates set him free yesterday, on Romer’s own responsibility. So the case will not come up at all. What do you make of that?”

“He is a wiser man than I imagined,” said James.

“And that’s not all!” cried his brother blowing the cigarette ashes from the open paper in front of him. “It appears the strike is in a good way of being settled by those damned delegates. We were idiots to trust them. I knew it. I told the men so. But they are all such hopeless fools. No doubt Romer has found some way of getting round them! The talk is now of arbitration, and a commissioner from the government. You mark my words, Daddy Jim, we shall be back working again by Monday.”

“But we shall get the chief thing we wanted, after all—if Lickwit is removed,” said James, rising from the table and going to the window, “I know I shall be quite satisfied myself, if I don’t see that rascal’s face any more.”

“The poor wretch has collapsed altogether, so they said down at the inn last night,” Luke put in. “My belief is that Romer has now staked everything on getting into Parliament and is ready to do anything to propitiate the neighbourhood. If that’s his line, he’ll succeed. He’ll out-manoeuvre our friend Wone at every step. When a man of his type once tries the conciliatory game be becomes irresistible. That is what these stupid employers so rarely realize. No doubt that’s his policy in stopping the process against Philip. He’s a shrewd fellow this Romer—and I shouldn’t wonder if, when the strike is settled, he became the most popular landlord in the country. Wone did for himself by sneaking off home that day, when things looked threatening. They were talking about that in Yeoborough. I shouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t lose him the election.”

“I hope not,” said James Andersen gazing out of the window at the gathering clouds. “I should be sorry to see that happen.”

“I should be damned glad!” cried his brother, pushing back his chair and luxuriously sipping his final cup of tea. “My sympathies are all with Romer in this business. He has acted magnanimously. He has acted shrewdly. I would sooner, any day, be under the control of a man like him, than see a sentimental charlatan like Wone get into Parliament.”

“You are unfair, my friend,” said the elder brother, opening the lower sash of the window and letting in such a draught of rainy wind that he was immediately compelled to re-close it, “you are thoroughly unfair. Wone is not in the least a charlatan. He believes every word he says, and he says a great many things that are profoundly true. I cannot see,” he went on, turning round and confronting his equable relative with a perturbed and troubled face, “why you have got your knife into Wone in this extreme manner. Of course he is conceited and long-winded, but the man is genuinely sincere. I call him rather a pathetic figure.”

“He looked pathetic enough when he sneaked off after that riot, leaving Philip in the hands of the police.”

“It annoys me the way you speak,” returned the elder brother, in growing irritation. “What right have you to call the one man’s discretion cowardice, and the other’s wise diplomacy? I don’t see that it was any more cowardice for Wone to protest against a riot, than for Romer to back down before public opinion as he seems now to have done. Besides, who can blame a fellow for wanting to avoid a scene like that? I know you wouldn’t have cared to encounter those Yeoborough roughs.”

“Old Romer encountered them,” retorted Luke. “They say he smoked a cigarette in their faces, and just waved them away, as if they were a cloud of gnats. I love a man who can do that sort of thing!”

“That’s right!” cried the elder brother growing thoroughly angry. “That’s the true Yellow Press attitude! Here we have one of your ‘still, strong men,’ afraid of no mob on earth! I know them—these strong men! It’s easy enough to be calm and strong when you have a banking-account like Romer’s, and all the police in the county on your side!”

“Brother Lickwit will not forget that afternoon,” remarked Luke, taking a rose from a vase on the table and putting it into his button-hole.

“Yes, Lickwit is the scape-goat,” rejoined the other. “Lickwit will have to leave the place, broken in his nerves, and ruined in his reputation, while his master gets universal praise for magnanimity and generosity! That is the ancient trick of these crafty oppressors.”

“Why do you use such grand words, Daddy Jim?” said Luke smiling and stretching out his legs. “It’s all nonsense, this talk about oppressors and oppressed. The world only contains two sorts of people—the capable ones and the incapable ones. I am all on the side of the capable ones!”

“I suppose that is why you are treating little Annie Bristow so abominably!” cried James, losing all command of his temper.

Luke made an indescribable grimace which converted his countenance in a moment from that of a gentle faun to that of an ugly Satyr.

“Ho! ho!” he exclaimed, “so we are on that tack are we? And please tell me, most virtuous moralist, why I am any worse in my attitude to Annie, than you in your attitude to Ninsy? It seems to me we are in the same box over these little jobs.”

“Damn you!” cried James Andersen, walking fiercely up to his brother and trembling with rage.

But Luke sipped his tea with perfect equanimity.

“It’s no good damning me,” he said quietly. “That will not alter the situation. The fact remains, that both of us have found our little village-girls rather a nuisance. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame myself. These things are inevitable. They are part of the system of the universe. Little girls have to learn—as the world moves round—that they can’t have everything they want. I don’t know whether you intend to marry Ninsy? I haven’t the slightest intention of marrying Annie.”

“But you’ve been making love to her for the last two months! You told me so yourself when we met her at Hullaway!”

“And you weren’t so very severe then, were you, Daddy Jim? It’s only because I have annoyed you this morning that you bring all this up. As a matter of fact, Annie is far less mad about me than Ninsy is about you. She’s already flirting with Bob Granger. Anyone can see she’s perfectly happy. She’s been happy ever since she made a fool of me over Gladys’ ring. As long as a girl knows she’s put you in a ridiculous position, she’ll very soon console herself. No doubt she’ll make Granger marry her before the summer’s over. Ninsy is quite a different person. Annie and I take our little affair in precisely the same spirit. I am no more to blame than she is. But Ninsy’s case is different. Ninsy is seriously and desperately in love with you. And her invalid state makes the situation a much more embarrassing one. I think my position is infinitely less complicated than yours, brother Jim!”

James Andersen’s face became convulsed with fury. He stretched out his arm towards his brother, and extended a threatening fore-finger.

“Young man,” he cried, “I will never forgive you for this!”

Having uttered these words he rushed incontinently out of the room, and, bare-headed as he was, proceeded to stride across the fields, in a direction opposite from that which led to Nevilton.

The younger brother shrugged his shoulders, drained his tea-cup, and meditatively lit another cigarette. The stone-works being closed, he had all the day before him in which to consider this unfortunate rupture. At the present moment, however, all he did was to call their landlady—the station-master’s buxom wife—and affably help her in the removal and washing up of the breakfast things.

Luke was an adept in all household matters. His supple fingers and light feminine movements were equal to almost any task, and while occupied in such things his gay and humorous conversation made any companion of his labour an enviable person. Mrs. Round, their landlady, adored him. There was nothing she would not have done at his request; and Lizzie, Betty, and Polly, her three little daughters, loved him more than they loved their own father. Having concerned himself for more than an hour with these agreeable people, Luke took his hat and stick, and strolling lazily along the railroad-line railings, surveyed with inquisitive interest the motley group of persons who were waiting, on the further side, for the approach of a train.

A little apart from the rest, seated on a bench beside a large empty basket, he observed the redoubtable Mrs. Fringe. Between this lady and himself there had existed for the last two years a sort of conspiracy of gossip. Like many other middle-aged women in Nevilton, Mrs. Fringe had made a pet and confidant of this attractive young man, who played, in spite of his mixed birth, a part almost analogous to that of an affable and ingratiating cadet of some noble family.

He passed through the turn-stile, crossed the track, and advanced slowly up the platform. His plump Gossip, observing him afar off, rose and moved to meet him, her basket swinging in her hand and a radiant smile upon her face. It was like an encounter between some Pantagruelian courtier and some colossal Gargamelle. They stood together, in the wind, at the extreme edge of the platform. Luke, who was dressed so well that it would have been impossible to distinguish him from any golden youth from Oxford or Cambridge, whispered shameless scandal into the lady’s ears, from beneath the shadow of his panama-hat. She on her side was equally confidential.

“There was a pretty scene down our way last night,” she said. “Miss Seldom came in with some books for my young Reverend and, Lord! they did have an ado. I heard ’un shouting at one another as though them were rampin’ mad. My master ’ee were hollerin’ Holy Scripture like as he were dazed, and the young lady she were answerin’ ’im with God knows what. From all I could gather of it, that girl had got some devil’s tale on Miss Gladys. ’Tweren’t as though she did actually name her by name, as you might say, but she pulled her hair and scratched her like any crazy cat, sideways-like and cross-wise. It seems she’d got hold of some story about that foreign young woman and Miss Gladys having her knife into ’er, but I saw well enough what was at the bottom of it and I won’t conceal it from ’ee, my dear. She do want ’im for herself. That’s the long and short. She do want ’im for herself!”

“What were they disputing about?” asked Luke eagerly. “Did you hear their words?”

“’Tis no good arstin’ me about their words,” replied Mrs. Fringe. “Those long-windy dilly-dallies do sound to me no more than the burbering of blowflies. God save us from such words! I’m not a reading woman and I don’t care who knows it. But I know when a wench is moon-daft on a fellow. I knows that, my dear, and I knows when she’s got a tale on another girl!”

“Did she talk about Catholicism to him?” enquired Luke.

“I won’t say as she didn’t bring something of that sort in,” replied his friend. “But ’twas Miss Gladys wot worried ’er. Any fool could see that. ’Tis my experience that when a girl and a fellow get hot on any of these dilly-dally argimints, there’s always some other maid biding round the corner.”

“I’ve just had a row with James,” remarked the stone-carver. “He’s gone off in a fury over towards Hullaway.”

Mrs Fringe put down her basket and glanced up and down the platform. Then she laid her hand on the young man’s arm.

“I wouldn’t say what I do now say, to anyone, but thee own self, dearie. And I wouldn’t say it to thee if it hadn’t been worriting me for some merciful long while. And what’s more I wouldn’t say it, if I didn’t know what you and your Jim are to one another. ‘More than brothers,’ is what the whole village do say of ye!”

“Go on—go on—Mrs. Fringe!” cried Luke. “That curst signal’s down, and I can hear the train.”

“There be other trains than wot run on them irons,” pronounced Mrs. Fringe sententiously, “and if you aren’t careful, one such God Almighty’s train will run over that brother of yours, sooner or later.”

Luke looked apprehensively up the long converging steel track. The gloom of the day and the ominous tone of his old gossip affected him very unpleasantly. He began to wish that there was not a deep muddy pond under the Hullaway elms.

“What on earth do you mean?” he cried, adding impatiently, “Oh damn that train!” as a cloud of smoke made itself visible in the distance.

“Only this, dearie,” said the woman picking up her basket, “only this. If you listen to me you’d sooner dig your own grave than have words with brother. Brother be not one wot can stand these fimble-fambles same as you and I. I know wot I do say, cos I was privileged, under Almighty God, to see the end of your dear mother.”

“I know—I know—” cried the young man, “but what do you mean?”

Mrs. Fringe thrust her arm through the handle of her basket and turned to meet the incoming train.

“’Twas when I lived with my dear husband down at Willow-Grove,” she said. “’Twas a stone’s throw there from where you and Jim were born. I always feared he would go, same as she went, sooner or later. He talks like her. He looks like her. He treats a person in the way she treated a person, poor moon-struck darling! ’Twas all along of your father. She couldn’t bide him along-side of her in the last days. And he knew it as well as you and I know it. But do ’ee think it made any difference to him? Not a bit, dearie! Not one little bit!”

The train had now stopped, and with various humorous observations, addressed to porters and passengers indiscriminately, Mrs. Fringe took her place in a carriage.

Heedless of being overheard, Luke addressed her through the window of the compartment. “But what about James? What were you saying about James?”

“’Tis too long a tale to tell ’ee, dearie,” murmured the woman breathlessly. “There be need now of all my blessed wits to do business for the Reverend. There, look at that!” She waved at him a crumpled piece of paper. “Beyond all thinking I’ve got to fetch him books from Slitly’s. Books, by the Lord! As if he hadn’t too many of the darned things for his poor brain already!”

The engine emitted a portentous puff of smoke, and the train began to move. Luke walked by the side of his friend’s window, his hand on the sash.

“You think it is inadvisable to thwart my brother, then,” he said, “in any way at all. You think I must humour him. You are afraid if I don’t—” His walk was of necessity quickened into a run.

“It’s a long story, dearie, a long story. But I had the privilege under God Almighty of knowing your blessed mother when she was called, and I tell you it makes my heart ache to see James going along the same road as—”

Her voice was extinguished by the noise of wheels and steam. Luke, exhausted, was compelled to relax his hold. The rest of the carriages passed him with accumulated speed and he watched the train disappear. In his excitement he had advanced far beyond the limits of the platform. He found himself standing in a clump of yellow rag-wort, just behind his own stone-cutter’s shed.

He gazed up the track, along which the tantalizing lady had been so inexorably snatched away. The rails had a dull whitish glitter but their look was bleak and grim. They suggested, in their narrow merciless perspective, cutting the pastures in twain, the presence of some remorseless mechanical Will carving its purpose, blindly and pitilessly, out of the innocent waywardness of thoughtless living things.

An immense and indefinable foreboding passed, like the insertion of a cold, dead finger, through the heart of the young man. Fantastic and terrible images pursued one another through his agitated brain. He saw his brother lying submerged in Hullaway Pond, while a group of frightened children stood, in white pinafores, stared at him with gaping mouths. He saw himself arriving upon this scene. He even went so far as to repeat to himself the sort of cry that such a sight might naturally draw from his lips, his insatiable dramatic sense making use, in this way, of his very panic, to project its irrepressible puppet-show. His brother’s words, “Young man, I will never forgive you for this,” rose luridly before him. He saw them written along the edge of a certain dark cloud which hung threateningly over the Hullaway horizon. He felt precisely what he would feel when he saw them—luminously phosphorescent—in the indescribable mud and greenish weeds that surrounded his brother’s dead face. A sickening sense of loss and emptiness went shivering through him. He felt as though nothing in the world was of the least importance except the life of James Andersen.

With hurried steps he recrossed the line, repassed the turn-stile, and began following the direction taken by his brother just two hours before. Never had the road to Hullaway seemed so long!

Half-way there, where the road took a devious turn, he left it, and entering the fields again, followed a vaguely outlined foot-path. This also betraying him, or seeming to betray him, by its departure from the straight route, he began crossing the meadows with feverish directness, climbing over hedges and ditches with the desperate preoccupation of one pursued by invisible pursuers. The expression upon his face, as he hurried forward in this manner, was the expression of a man who has everything he values at stake. A casual acquaintance would never have supposed that the equable countenance of Luke Andersen had the power to look so haggard, so drawn, so troubled. He struck the road again less than half a mile from his destination. Why he was so certain that Hullaway was the spot he sought, he could hardly have explained. It was, however, one of his own favourite walks on rainless evenings and Sunday afternoons, and quite recently he had several times persuaded his brother to accompany him. He himself was wont to haunt the place and its surroundings, because of the fact that, about a mile to the west of it, there stood an isolated glove-factory to which certain of the Nevilton girls were accustomed to make their way across the field-paths.

Hullaway village was a very small place, considerably more remote from the world than Nevilton, and attainable only by narrow lanes. The centre of it was the great muddy stagnant pond which now so dominated Luke’s alarmed imagination. Near the pond was a group of elms, of immense antiquity,—many of them mere stumps of trees,—but all of them possessed of wide-spreading prominent roots, and deeply indented hollow trunks worn as smooth as ancient household furniture, by the constant fumbling and scrambling of generations of Hullaway children.

The only other objects of interest in the place, were a small, unobtrusive church, built, like everything else in the neighborhood, of Leonian stone, and an ancient farm-house surrounded by a high manorial wall. Beneath one of the Hullaway Elms stood an interesting relic of a ruder age, in the shape of some well-worn stocks, now as pleasant a seat for rural gossips as they were formerly an unpleasant pillory for rural malefactors.

As Luke Andersen approached this familiar spot he observed with a certain vague irritation the well-known figure of one of his most recent Nevilton enchantresses. The girl was no other, in fact, than that shy companion of Annie Bristow who had been amusing herself with them in the Fountain Square on the occasion of Mr. Clavering’s ill-timed intervention. At this moment she was sauntering negligently along, on a high-raised path of narrow paved flag-stones, such paths being a peculiarity of Hullaway, due to the prevalence of heavy autumn floods.

The girl was evidently bound for the glove-factory, for she swung a large bundle as she walked, resting it idly every now and then, on any available wall or rail or close-cut hedge, along which she passed. She was an attractive figure, tall, willowy, and lithe, and she walked in that lingering, swaying voluptuous manner which gives to the movements of maidens of her type a sort of provocative challenge. Luke, advancing along the road behind her, caught himself admiring, in spite of his intense preoccupation, the alluring swing of her walk and the captivating lines of her graceful person.

The moment was approaching that he had so fantastically dreaded, the moment of his first glance at Hullaway Great Pond. He was already relieved to see no signs of anything unusual in the air of the place,—but the imaged vision of his brother’s drowned body still hovered before him, and that fatal “I’ll never forgive you for this!” still rang in his ears.

His mind all this while was working with extraordinary rapidity and he was fully conscious of the grotesque irrelevance of this lapse into the ingrained habit of wanton admiration. Quickly, in a flash of lightning, he reviewed all his amorous adventures and his frivolous philanderings. How empty, how bleak, how impossible, all such pleasures seemed, without the dark stooping figure of this companion of his soul as their taciturn background! He looked at Phyllis Santon with a sudden savage resolution, and made a quaint sort of vow in the depths of his heart.

“I’ll never speak to the wench again or look at her again,” he said to himself, “if I find Daddy Jim safe and sound, and if he forgives me!”

He hurried past her, almost at a run, and arrived at the centre of Hullaway. There was the Great Pond, with its low white-washed stone parapet. There were the ancient elm-trees and the stocks. There also were the white-pinafored infants playing in the hollow aperture of the oldest among the trees. But the slimy surface of the water was utterly undisturbed save by two or three assiduous ducks who at intervals plunged beneath it.

He drew an immense sigh of relief and glanced casually round. Phyllis had not failed to perceive him. With a shy little friendly smile she advanced towards him. His vow was already in some danger. He waved her a hasty greeting but did not take her hand.

“You’d better put yourself into the stocks,” he said, covering with a smile the brutality of his neglect, “until I come back! I have to find James.”

Leaving her standing in mute consternation, he rushed off to the churchyard on the further side of the little common. There was a certain spot here, under the shelter of the Manor wall, where Luke and his brother had spent several delicious afternoons, moralizing upon the quaint epitaphs around them, and smoking cigarettes. Luke felt as if he were almost sure to find James stretched out at length before a certain old tombstone whose queer appeal to the casual intruder had always especially attracted him. Both brothers had a philosophical mania for these sepulchral places, and the Hullaway grave-yard was even more congenial to their spirit than the Nevilton one, perhaps because this latter was so dominatingly possessed by their own dead.

Luke entered the enclosure through a wide-open wooden gate and glanced quickly round him. There was the Manor wall, as mellow and sheltering as ever, even on such a day of clouds. There was their favourite tombstone, with its long inscription to the defunct seignorial house. But of James Andersen there was not the remotest sign.

Where the devil had his angry brother gone? Luke’s passionate anxiety began to give place to a certain indignant reaction. Why were people so ridiculous? These volcanic outbursts of ungoverned emotion on trifling occasions were just the things that spoiled the harmony and serenity of life. Where, on earth, could James have slipped off to? He remembered that they had more than once gone together to the King’s Arms—the unpretentious Hullaway tavern. It was just within the bounds of possibility that the wanderer, finding their other haunts chill and unappealing, had taken refuge there.

He recrossed the common, waved his hand to Phyllis, who seemed to have taken his speech quite seriously and was patiently seated on the stocks, and made his way hurriedly to the little inn.

Yes—there, ensconced in a corner of the high settle, with a half-finished tankard of ale by his side, was his errant brother.

James rose at once to greet him, showing complete friendliness, and very small surprise. He seemed to have been drinking more than his wont, however, for he immediately sank back again into his corner, and regarded his brother with a queer absent-minded look.

Luke ordered a glass of cider and sat down close to him on the settle.

“I am sorry,” he whispered, laying his hand on his brother’s knee. “I didn’t mean to annoy you. What you said was quite true. I treated Annie very badly. And Ninsy is altogether different. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, Daddy Jim?”

James Andersen pressed his hand. “It’s nothing,” he said in rather a thick voice. “It’s like everything else, it’s nothing. I was a fool. I am still a fool. But it’s better to be a fool than to be dead, isn’t it? Or am I talking nonsense?”

“As long as you’re not angry with me any longer,” answered Luke eagerly, “I don’t care how you talk!”

“I went to the churchyard—to our old place—you know,” went on his brother. “I stayed nearly an hour there—or was it more? Perhaps it was more. I stayed so long, anyway, that I nearly went to sleep. I think I must have gone to sleep!” he added, after a moment’s pause.

“I expect you were tired,” remarked Luke rather weakly, feeling for some reason or other, a strange sense of disquietude.

“Tired?” exclaimed the recumbent man, “why should I be tired?” He raised himself up with a jerk, and finishing his glass, set it down with meticulous care upon the ground beside him.

Luke noticed, with an uncomfortable sense of something not quite usual in his manner, that every movement he made and every word he spoke seemed the result of a laborious and conscious effort—like the effort of one in incomplete control of his sensory nerves.

“What shall we do now?” said Luke with an air of ease and indifference. “Do you feel like strolling back to Nevilton, or shall we make a day of it and go on to Roger-Town Ferry and have dinner there?”

James gave vent to a curiously unpleasant laugh. “You go, my dear,” he said, “and leave me where I am.”

Luke began to feel thoroughly uncomfortable. He once more laid his hand caressingly on his brother’s knee. “You have really forgiven me?” he pleaded. “Really and truly?”

James Andersen had again sunk back into a semi-comatose state in his corner. “Forgive?” he muttered, as though he found difficulty in understanding the meaning of the word, “forgive? I tell you it’s nothing.”

He was silent, and then, in a still more drowsy murmur, he uttered the word “Nothing” three or four times. Soon after this he closed his eyes and relapsed into a deep slumber.

“Better leave ’un as ’un be,” remarked the landlord to Luke. “I’ve had my eye on ’un for this last ’arf hour. ’A do seem mazed-like, looks so. Let ’un bide where ’un be, master. These be wonderful rumbly days for a man’s head. ’Taint what ’ee’s ’ad, you understand; to my thinking, ’tis these thunder-shocks wot ’ave worrited ’im.”

Luke nodded at the man, and standing up surveyed his brother gravely. It certainly looked as if James was settled in his corner for the rest of the morning. Luke wondered if it would be best to let him remain where he was, and sleep off his coma, or to rouse him and try and persuade him to return home. He decided to take the landlord’s advice.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll just leave him for a while to recover himself. You’ll keep an eye to him, won’t you, Mr. Titley? I’ll just wander round a bit, and come back. May-be if he doesn’t want to go home to dinner, we’ll have a bite of something here with you.”

Mr. Titley promised not to let his guest out of his sight. “I know what these thunder-shocks be,” he said. “Don’t you worry, mister. You’ll find ’un wonderful reasonable along of an hour or so. ’Tis the weather wot ’ave him floored ’im. The liquor ’ee’s put down wouldn’t hurt a cat.”

Luke threw an affectionate glance at his brother’s reclining figure and went out. The reaction from his exaggerated anxiety left him listless and unnerved. He walked slowly across the green, towards the group of elms.

It was now past noon and the small children who had been loitering under the trees had been carried off to their mid-day meal. The place seemed entirely deserted, except for the voracious ducks in the mud of the Great Pond. He fancied at first that Phyllis Santon had disappeared with the children, and a queer feeling of disappointment descended upon him. He would have liked at least to have had the opportunity of refusing himself the pleasure of talking to her! He approached the enormous elm under which stood the stocks. Ah! She was still there then, his little Nevilton acquaintance. He had not seen her sooner, because she was seated on the lowest roots of the tree, her knees against the stocks themselves.

“Hullo, child!” he found himself saying, while his inner consciousness told itself that he would just say one word to her, so that her feelings should not be hurt, and then stroll off to the churchyard. “Why, you have fixed yourself in the very place where they used to make people sit, when they put them in the stocks!”

“Have I?” said the girl looking up at him without moving. “’Tis curious to think of them days! They do say folks never tasted meat nor butter in them old times. I guess it’s better to be living as we be.”

Luke’s habitual tone of sentimental moralizing had evidently set the fashion among the maids of Nevilton. Girls are incredibly quick at acquiring the mental atmosphere of a philosopher who attracts them. The simple flattery of her adoption of his colour of thought made it still more difficult for Luke to keep his vow to the Spinners of Destiny.

“Yes,” he remarked pensively, seating himself on the stocks above her. “It is extraordinary, isn’t it, to think how many generations of people, like you and me, have talked to one another here, in fine days and cloudy days, in winter and summer—and the same old pond and the same old elms listening to all they say?”

“Don’t say that, Luke dear,” protested the girl, with a little apprehensive movement of her shoulders, and a tightened clasp of her hands round her knees. “I don’t like to think of that! ’Tis lonesome enough in this place, mid-day, without thinking of them ghost-stories.”

“Why do you say ghost-stories?” inquired Luke. “There’s nothing ghostly about that dirty old pond and there’s nothing ghostly about these hollow trees—not now, any way.”

“’Tis what you said about their listening, that seems ghostly-like to me,” replied the girl. “I am always like that, you know. Sometimes, down home, I gets a grip of the terrors from staring at old Mr. Pratty’s barn. ’Tis funny, isn’t it? I suppose I was born along of Christmas. They say children born then are wonderful ones for fancying things.”

Luke prodded the ground with his cane and looked at her in silence. Conscious of a certain admiration in his look, for the awkwardness of her pose only enhanced the magnetic charm of her person, she proceeded to remove her hat and lean her head with a wistful abandonment against the rough bark of the tree.

The clouds hung heavily over them, and it seemed that at any moment the rain might descend in torrents; but so far not a drop had fallen. Queer and mysterious emotions passed through Luke’s mind.

He felt in some odd way that he was at a turning-point in the tide of his existence. It almost seemed to him as though, silent and unmoving, under the roof of the little inn which he could see from where he sat, his brother was lying in the crisis of some dangerous fever. A movement, or gesture, or word, from himself might precipitate this crisis, in one direction or the other.

The girl crouched at his feet became to him, as he gazed at her, something more than a mere amorous acquaintance. She became a type, a symbol—an incarnation of the formidable writing of that Moving Finger, to which all flesh must bow. Her half-coquettish, half-serious apprehensions, about the ghostliness of the things that are always listening, as the human drama works itself out in their dumb presence, affected him in spite of himself. The village of Hullaway seemed at that moment to have disappeared into space, and he and his companion to be isolated and suspended—remote from all terrestrial activities, and yet aware of some confused struggle between invisible antagonists.

From the splashing ducks in the pond who, every now and then, so ridiculously turned up their squat tails to the cloudy heavens, his eye wandered to the impenetrable expectancy of the stone path which bordered the muddy edge of the water. With the quick sense of one whose daily occupation was concerned with this particular stone, he began calculating how long that time-worn pavement had remained there, and how many generations of human feet, hurrying or loitering, had passed along it since it was first laid down. What actual men, he wondered, had brought it there, from its resting-place, Æons-old in the distant hill, and laid it where it now lay, slab by slab?

From where he sat he could just observe, between a gap in the trees of the Manor-Farm garden, the extreme edge of that Leonian promontory. It seemed to him as though the hill were at that moment being swept by a storm of rain. He shivered a little at the idea of how such a sweeping storm, borne on a northern wind, would invade those bare trenches and unprotected escarpments. He felt glad that his brother had selected Hullaway rather than that particular spot for his angry retreat.

With a sense of relief he turned his eyes once more to the girl reclining below him in such a charming attitude.

How absurd it was, he thought, to let these vague superstitions overmaster him! Surely it was really an indication of cowardice, in the presence of a hypothetical Fate, to make such fantastic vows as that which he had recently made. It was all part of the atavistic survival in him of that unhappy “conscience,” which had done so much to darken the history of the tribes of men. It was like “touching wood” in honour of infernal deities! What was the use of being a philosopher—of being so deeply conscious of the illusive and subjective nature of all these scruples—if, at a crisis, one only fell back into such absurd morbidity? The vow he had registered in his mind an hour before, seemed to him now a piece of grotesque irrelevance—a lapse, a concession to weakness, a reversion to primitive inhibition. If it had been cowardice to make such a vow, it were a still greater cowardice to keep it.

He rose from his seat on the stocks, and began idly lifting up and down the heavy wooden bar which surmounted this queer old pillory. He finally left the thing open and gaping; its semi-circular cavities ready for any offender. Moved by a sudden impulse, the girl leant back still further against the tree, and whimsically raising one of her little feet, inserted it into the aperture. Amused at her companion’s interest in this levity, and actuated by a profound girlish instinct to ruffle the situation by some startling caprice, she had no sooner got one ankle into the cavity thus prepared for it, than with a sudden effort she placed the other by its side, and coyly straightening her skirts with her hands, looked up smiling into Luke’s face.

Thus challenged, as it were, by this wilful little would-be malefactor, Luke was mechanically compelled to complete her imprisonment. With a sudden vicious snap he let down the enclosing bar.

She was now completely powerless; for the most drastic laws of balance made it quite impossible that she could release herself. It thus became inevitable that he should slip down on the ground by her side, and begin teasing her, indulging himself in sundry innocent caresses which her helpless position made it difficult to resist.

It was not long, however, before Phyllis, fearful of the appearance upon the scene of some of Hullaway’s inhabitants, implored him to release her.

Luke rose and with his hand upon the bar contemplated smilingly his fair prisoner.

“Please be quick!” the girl cried impatiently. “I’m getting so stiff.”

“Shall I, or shan’t I?” said Luke provokingly.

The corner of the girl’s mouth fell and her under-lip quivered. It only needed a moment’s further delay to reduce her to tears.

At that moment two interruptions occurred simultaneously. From the door of the King’s Arms emerged the landlord, and began making vehement signals to Luke; while from the corner of the road to Nevilton appeared the figures of two young ladies, walking briskly towards them, absorbed in earnest conversation. These simultaneous events were observed in varying ratio by the captive and her captor. Luke was vaguely conscious of the two ladies and profoundly agitated by the appearance of the landlord. Phyllis was vaguely conscious of the landlord and was profoundly agitated by the appearance of the ladies. The young stone-carver gave a quick thoughtless jerk to the bar; and without waiting to see the result, rushed off towards the inn. The heavy block of wood, impelled by the impetus he had given it, swung upwards, until it almost reached the perpendicular. Then it descended with a crash. The girl had just time to withdraw one of her ankles. The other was imprisoned as hopeless as before.

Phyllis was overwhelmed with shame and embarrassment. She had in a moment recognized Gladys, and she felt as those Apocalyptic unfortunates in Holy Scripture are reported as feeling when they call upon the hills to cover them.

It had happened that Ralph Dangelis had been compelled to pay a flying visit to London on business connected with his proposed marriage. The two cousins, preoccupied, each of them, with their separate anxieties, had wandered thus far from home to escape the teasing fussiness of Mrs. Romer, who with her preparations for the double wedding gave neither of them any peace.

They approached quite near to the group of elms before either of them observed the unfortunate Phyllis.

“Why!” cried Gladys suddenly to her companion. “There’s somebody in the stocks!”

She went forward hastily, followed at a slower pace by the Italian. Poor Phyllis, her bundle by her side, and her cheeks tear-stained, presented a woeful enough appearance. Her first inclination was to hide her face in her hands; but making a brave effort, she turned her head towards the new-comers with a gasping little laugh.

“I put my foot in here for a joke,” she stammered, “and it got caught. Please let me out, Miss Romer.”

Gladys came quite near and laid her gloved hand upon the wooden bar.

“It just lifts up, Miss,” pleaded Phyllis, with tears in her voice. “It isn’t at all heavy.”

Gladys stared at her with a growing sense of interest. The girl’s embarrassment under her scrutiny awoke her Romer malice.

“I really don’t know that I want to let you out in such a hurry,” she said. “If it’s a game you are playing, it would be a pity to spoil it. Who put you in? You must tell me that, before I set you free! You couldn’t have done it yourself.”

By this time Lacrima had arrived on the scene.

The shame-faced Phyllis turned to her. “Please, Miss Traffio, please, lift that thing up! It’s quite easy to move.”

The Italian at once laid her hands upon the block of wood and struggled to raise it; but Gladys had no difficulty in keeping the bar immoveable.

“What are you doing?” cried the younger girl indignantly. “Take your arm away!”

“She must tell us first who put her where she is,” reiterated Miss Romer. “I won’t have her let out ’till she tells us that!”

Phyllis looked piteously from one to the other. Then she grew desperate.

“It was Luke Andersen,” she whispered.

“What!” cried Gladys. “Luke? Then he’s been out walking with you? Has he? Has he? Has he?”

She repeated these words with such concentrated fury that Phyllis began to cry. But the shock of this information gave Lacrima her chance. Using all her strength she lifted the heavy bar and released the prisoner. Phyllis staggered to her feet and picked up her bundle. Lacrima handed the girl her hat and helped her to brush the dust from her clothes.

“So you are Luke’s latest fancy are you?” Gladys said scowling fiercely at the glove-maker.

The pent-up feelings of the young woman broke forth at once. Moving a step or two away from them and glancing at a group of farm-men who were crossing the green, she gave full scope to her revenge.

“I’m only Annie Bristow’s friend,” she retorted. “Annie Bristow is going to marry Luke. They are right down mad on one another.”

“It’s a lie!” cried Gladys, completely forgetting herself and looking as if she could have struck the mocking villager.

“A lie, eh?” returned the other. “Tisn’t for me to tell the tale to a young lady, the likes of you. But we be all guessing down in Mr. North’s factory, who ’twas that gave Luke the pretty lady-like ring wot he lent to Annie!”

Gladys became livid with anger. “What ring?” she cried. “Why are you talking about a ring?”

“Annie, she stuck it, for devilry, into that hole in Splash-Lane stone. She pushed it in, tight as ’twere a sham diamint. And there it do bide, the lady’s pretty ring, all glittery and shiny, at bottom of that there hole! We maids do go to see ’un glinsying and gleaming. It be the talk of the place, that ring be! Scarce one of the childer but ’as ’ad its try to hook ’un out. But ’tis no good. I guess Annie must have rammed it down with her mother’s girt skewer. ’Tis fast in that stone anyway, for all the world to see. Folks, may-be, ’ll be coming from Yeoborough, long as a few days be over, to see the lady’s ring, wot Annie threw’d away, ’afore she said ‘yes’ to her young man!”

These final words were positively shouted by the enraged Phyllis, as she tripped away, swinging her bundle triumphantly.

It seemed for a moment as though Gladys meditated a desperate pursuit, and the infliction of physical violence upon her enemy. But Lacrima held her fast by the hand. “For heaven’s sake, cousin,” she whispered, “let her go. Look at those men watching us!”

Gladys turned; but it was not at the farm-men she looked.

Across the green towards them came the two Andersens, Luke looking nervous and worried, and his brother gesticulating strangely. The girls remained motionless, neither advancing to meet them nor making any attempt to evade them. Gladys seemed to lose her defiant air, and waited their approach, rather with the look of one expecting to be chidden than of one prepared to chide. On all recent occasions this had been her manner, when in the presence of the young stone-carver.

The sight of Lacrima seemed to exercise a magical effect upon James Andersen. He ceased at once his excited talk, and advancing towards her, greeted her in his normal tone—a tone of almost paternal gentleness.

“It is nearly a quarter to one,” said Gladys, addressing both the men. “Lacrima and I’ll have all we can do to get back in time for lunch. Let’s walk back together!”

Luke looked at his brother who gave him a friendly smile. He also looked sharply at the Hullaway labourers, who were shuffling off towards the barton of the Manor-Farm.

“I don’t mind,” he said; “though it is a dangerous time of day! But we can go by the fields, and you can leave us at Roandyke Barn.”

They moved off along the edge of the pond together.

“It was Lacrima, not I, Luke,” said Gladys presently, “who let that girl out.”

Luke flicked a clump of dock-weeds with his cane. “It was her own fault,” he said carelessly. “I thought I’d opened the thing. I was called away suddenly.”

Gladys bowed her head submissively. In the company of the young stone-carver her whole nature seemed to change. A shrewd observer might even have marked a subtle difference in her physical appearance. She appeared to wilt and droop, like a tropical flower transplanted into a northern zone.

They remained all together until they reached the fields. Then Gladys and Luke dropped behind.

“I have something I want to tell you,” said the fair girl, as soon as the others were out of hearing. “Something very important.”

“I have something to tell you too,” answered Luke, “and I think I will tell it first. It is hardly likely that your piece of news can be as serious as mine.”

They paused at a stile; and the girl made him take her in his arms and kiss her, before she consented to hear what he had to say.

It would have been noticeable to any observer that in the caresses they exchanged, Luke played the perfunctory, and she the passionate part. She kissed him thirstily, insatiably, with clinging lips that seemed avid of his very soul. When at last they moved on through grass that was still wet with the rain of the night before, Luke drew his hand away from hers, as if to emphasize the seriousness of his words.

“I am terribly anxious, dearest, about James,” he said. “We had an absurd quarrel this morning, and he rushed off to Hullaway in a rage. I found him in the inn. He had been drinking, but it was not that which upset him. He had not taken enough to affect him in that way. I am very, very anxious about him. I forget whether I’ve ever told you about my mother? Her mind—poor darling—was horribly upset before she died. She suffered from more than one distressing mania. And my fear is that James may go the same way.”

Gladys hung her head. In a strange and subtle way she felt as though the responsibility of this new catastrophe rested upon her. Her desperate passion for Luke had so unnerved her, that she had become liable to be victimized by any sort of superstitious apprehension.

“How dreadful!” she whispered, “but he seemed to me perfectly natural just now.”

“That was Lacrima’s doing,” said Luke. “Lacrima is at the bottom of it all. I wish, oh, I wish, she was going to marry James, instead of that uncle of yours.”

“Father would never allow that,” said Gladys, raising her head. “He is set upon making her take uncle John. It has become a kind of passion with him. Father is funny in these things.”

“Still—it might be managed,” muttered Luke thoughtfully, “if we carried it through with a high hand. We might arrange it; the world is malleable, after all. If you and I, my dear, put our heads together, Mr. John Goring might whistle for his bride.”

“I hate Lacrima!” cried Gladys, with a sudden access of her normal spirit.

“I don’t care two pence about Lacrima,” returned Luke. “It is of James I am thinking.”

“But she would be happy with James, and I don’t want her to be happy.”

“What a little devil you are!” exclaimed the stone-carver, slipping his arm round her waist.

“Yes, I know I am,” she answered shamelessly. “I suppose I inherit it from father. He hates people just like that. But I am not a devil with you, Luke, am I? I wish I were!” she added, after a little pause.

“We must think over this business from every point of view,” said Luke solemnly. “I cannot help thinking that if you and I resolve to do it, we can twist the fates round, somehow or another. I am sure Lacrima could save James if she liked. If you could only have seen the difference between what he was when I was called back to him just now, and what he became as soon as he set eyes upon her, you would know what I mean. He is mad about her, and if he doesn’t get her, he’ll go really mad. He was a madman just now. He nearly frightened that fool Titley into a fit.”

“I don’t want Lacrima to marry James,” burst out Gladys. Luke in a moment drew his arm away, and quickened his pace.

“As you please,” he said. “But I can promise you this, my friend, that if anything does happen to my brother, it’ll be the end of everything between us.”

“Why—what—how can you say such dreadful things?” stammered the girl.

Luke airily swung his stick. “It all rests with you, child. Though we can’t marry, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on seeing each other, as we do now, forever and ever,—as long as you help me in this affair. But if you’re going to sulk and talk this nonsense about ‘hating’—it is probable that it will be a case of good-bye!”

The fair girl’s face was distorted by a spasmodic convulsion of conflicting emotions. She bit her lip and hung her head. Presently she looked up again and flung her arms round his neck. “I’ll do anything you ask me, Luke, anything, as long as you don’t turn against me.”

They walked along for some time in silence, hand in hand, taking care not to lose sight of their two companions who seemed as engrossed as themselves in one another’s society. James Andersen was showing sufficient discretion in avoiding the more frequented foot-paths.

“Luke,” began the girl at last, “did you really give my ring to Annie Santon?”

Luke’s brow clouded in a moment. “Damn your ring!” he cried harshly. “I’ve got other things to think about now than your confounded rings. When people give me presents of that kind,” he added “I take for granted I can do what I like with them.”

Gladys trembled and looked pitifully into his face.

“But that girl said,” she murmured—“that factory girl, I mean—that it had been lost in some way; hidden, she said, in some hole in a stone. I can’t believe that you would let me be made a laughing-stock of, Luke dear?”

“Oh, don’t worry me about that,” replied the stone-carver. “May-be it is so, may-be it isn’t so; anyway it doesn’t matter a hang.”

“She said too,” pleaded Gladys in a hesitating voice, “that you and Annie were going to be married.”

“Ho! ho!” laughed Luke, fumbling with some tightly tied hurdles that barred their way; “so she said that, did she? She must have had her knife into you, our little Phyllis. Well, and what’s to stop me if I did decide to marry Annie?”

Gladys gasped and looked at him with a drawn and haggard face. Her beauty was of the kind that required the flush of buoyant spirits to illuminate it. The more her heart ached, the less attractive she became. She was anything but beautiful now; and, as he looked at her, Luke noticed for the first time, how low her hair grew upon her forehead.

“You wouldn’t think of doing that?” she whispered, in a tone of supplication. He laughed lightly and lifting up her chin made as though he were going to kiss her, but drew back without doing so.

“Are you going to be good,” he said, “and help me to get Lacrima for James?”

She threw her arms round him. “I’ll do anything you like—anything,” she repeated, “if you’ll only let me love you!”

While this conversation was proceeding between these two, a not less interesting clash of divergent emotions was occurring between their friends. The Italian may easily be pardoned if she never for one second dreamed of the agitation in her companion’s mind that had so frightened Luke. James’ manner was in no way different from usual, and though he expressed his feelings in a more unreserved fashion than he had ever done before, Lacrima had been for many weeks expecting some such outbreak.

“Don’t be angry with me,” he was saying, as he strode by her side. “I had meant never to have told you of this. I had meant to let it die with me, without your ever knowing, but somehow—today—I could not help it.”

He had confessed to her point blank, and in simple, unbroken words, the secret of his heart, and Lacrima had for some moments walked along with head averted making no response.

It would not be true to say that this revelation surprised her. It would be completely untrue to say it offended her. It did not even enter her mind that it might have been kinder to have been less friendly, less responsive, than she had been, to this queer taciturn admirer. But circumstances had really given her very little choice in the matter. She had been, as it were, flung perforce upon his society, and she had accepted, as a providential qualification of her loneliness, the fact that he was attracted towards her rather than repelled by her.

It is quite possible that had he remained untouched by the evasive appeal of her timid grace; had he, for instance, remained a provocative and impenetrable mystery at her side, she might have been led to share his feelings. But, unluckily for poor Andersen, the very fact that his feelings had been disclosed only too clearly, militated hopelessly against such an event. He was no remote, shadowy, romantic possibility to her—a closed casket of wonders, difficult and dangerous to open. He was simply a passionate and assiduous lover. The fact that he could love her, lowered him a little in Lacrima’s esteem. True to her Pariah instincts she felt that such passion was a sign of weakness in him; and if she did not actually despise him for it, it materially lessened the interest she took in the workings of his mind. Maurice Quincunx drew her to him for the very reason that he was so sexless, so cold, so wayward, so full of whimsical caprices. Maurice, a Pariah himself, excited at the same time her maternal tenderness and her imaginative affection. If she did not feel the passion for him that she might have felt for Andersen, had Andersen remained inaccessible; that was only because there was something in Maurice’s peculiar egoism which chilled such feelings at their root.

Another almost equally effective cause of her lack of response to the stone-carver’s emotion was the cynical and world-deep weariness that had fallen upon her, since this dreadful marriage with Goring had become a settled event. Face to face with this, she felt as though nothing mattered very much, and as though any feeling she herself might excite in another person must needs be like the passing of a shadow across a mirror—something vague, unreal, insubstantial—something removed to a remote distance, like the voice of a person at the end of a long tunnel, or as the dream of someone who is himself a figure in a dream. If anyone, she felt, broke into the enchanted circle that surrounded her, it was as if they sought to make overtures to a person dead and buried.

It was almost with the coldness and detachment of the dead that she now answered him, and her voice went sighing across the wet fields with a desolation that would have struck a more normal mind than Andersen’s as the incarnation of tragedy. He was himself, however, strung up to such a tragic note, that the despair in her tone affected him less than it would have affected another.

“I have come to feel,” said she, “that I have no heart, and I feel as though this country of yours had no heart. It ought to be always cloudy and dark in this place. Sunshine here is a kind of bitter mockery.”

“You do not know—you do not know what you say,” cried the poor stone-carver, quickening his pace in his excitement so that it became difficult for her to keep up with him. “I have loved you, since I first saw you—that day—down at our works—when the hawthorn was out. My heart at any rate is deep enough, deep enough to be hurt more than you would believe, Lacrima. Oh, if things were only different! If you could only bring yourself to care for me a little—just a little! Lacrima, listen to me.”

He stopped abruptly in the middle of a field and made her turn and face him. He laid his hand solemnly and imploringly upon her wrist. “Why need you put yourself under this frightful yoke? I know something of what you have had to go through. I know something, though it may be only a little, of what this horrible marriage means to you. Lacrima, for your own sake—as well as mine—for the sake of everyone who has ever cared for you—don’t let them drag you into this atrocious trap.

“Trust me, give yourself boldly into my care. Let’s go away together and try our fortune in some new place! All places are not like Nevilton. I am a strong man, I know my trade, I could earn money easily to keep us both. Lacrima, don’t turn away, don’t look so helpless! After all, things might be worse, you might be already married to that man, and be buried alive forever! It is not yet too late. You are still free. I beg and implore you, by everything you hold sacred, to stop and escape before it is too late. It doesn’t matter that you don’t love me now. As long as you don’t utterly hate me all can be put right. I don’t ask you to return what I feel for you. I won’t ask it if you agree to marry me. I’ll make any contract with you you please, and swear any vow. I won’t come near you when we are together. We can live under one roof as brother and sister. The wedding-ring will be nothing between us. It will only protect you from the rest of the world. I won’t interfere with your life at all, when once I have freed you from this devil’s hole. It will only be a marriage in form, in name; everything else will be just as you please. I will obey your least wish, your least fancy. If you want to go back to your own country and to go alone, I will save up money enough to make that possible. In fact, I have now got money enough to pay your journey and I would send out more to you. Lacrima, let me help you to break away from all this. You must, Lacrima, you must and you shall! If you prefer it, we needn’t ever be married. I don’t want to take advantage of you. I’ll give you every penny I have and help you out of the country and then send you more as I earn it. It is madness, this devilish marriage they are driving you into. It is madness and folly to submit to it. It is monstrous. It is ridiculous. You are free to go, they have no hold upon you. Lacrima, Lacrima! why are you so cruel to yourself, to me, to everyone who cares for you?”

He drew breath at last, but continued to clutch her wrist with a trembling hand, glancing anxiously, as he waited, at the lessening distance that separated them from the others.

Lacrima looked at him with a pale troubled face, but her large eyes were full of tears and when she spoke her voice quivered.

“I was wrong, my friend, to say that none of you here had any heart. Your heart is large and noble. I shall never—never forget what you have now said to me. But James—but James, dear,” and her voice shook still more, “I cannot, I cannot do it. There are more reasons than I can explain to you, why this thing must happen. It has to happen, and we must bow our heads and submit. After all, life is not very long, or very happy, at the best. Probably,”—and she smiled a sad little smile,—“I should disappoint you frightfully if we did go together. I am not such a nice person as you suppose. I have queer moods—oh, such strange, strange moods!—and I know for certain that I should not make you happy.

“Shall I tell you a horrible secret, James?” Here her voice sank into a curious whisper and she laughed a low distressing laugh. “I have really got the soul, the soul I say, not the nerves or sense, of a girl who has lost everything,—I wish I could make you understand—who has lost self-respect and everything,—I have thought myself into this state. I don’t care now—I really don’t—what happens to me. James, dear—you wouldn’t want to marry a person like that, a person who feels herself already dead and buried? Yes, and worse than dead! A person who has lost all pity, all feeling, even for herself. A person who is past even caring for the difference between right and wrong! You wouldn’t want to be kind to a person like that, James, would you?”

She stopped and gazed into his face, smiling a woeful little smile. Andersen mechanically noticed that their companions had observed their long pause, and had delayed to advance, resting beneath the shelter of a wind-tossed ash-tree. The stone-carver began to realize the extraordinary and terrible loneliness of every human soul. Here he was, face to face with the one being of all beings whose least look or word thrilled him with intolerable excitement, and yet he could not as much as touch the outer margin of her real consciousness.

He had not the least idea, even at that fatal moment, what her inner spirit was feeling; what thoughts, what sensations, were passing through her soul. Nor could he ever have. They might stand together thus, isolated from all the world, through an eternity of physical contact, and he would never attain such knowledge. She would always remain aloof, mysterious, evasive. He resolved that at all events as far as he himself was concerned, there should be no barrier between them. He would lay open to her the deepest recesses of his heart.

He began a hurried incoherent history of his passion, of its growth, its subtleties, its intensity. He tried to make her realize what she had become for him, how she filled every hour of every day with her image. He explained to her how clearly and fully he understood the difficulty, the impossibility, of his ever bringing her to care for him as he cared for her.

He even went so far as to allude to Mr. Quincunx, and implored her to believe that he would be well content if she would let him earn money enough to support both her and Maurice, either in Nevilton or elsewhere, if it would cut the tragic knot of her fate to join her destiny to that of the forlorn recluse.

It almost seemed as though this final stroke of self-abnegation excited more eloquence in him than all the rest. He begged and conjured her to cut boldly loose from the Romer bonds, and marry her queer friend, if he, rather than any other, were the choice she made. His language became so vehement, his tone so impassioned and exalted, that the girl began to look apprehensively at him. Even this apprehension, however, was a thing strangely removed from reality. His reckless words rose and fell upon the air and mixed with the rising wind as if they were words remembered from some previous existence. The man’s whole figure, his gaunt frame, his stooping shoulders, his long arms and lean fingers, seemed to her like something only half-tangible, something felt and seen through a dim medium of obscuring mist.

Lacrima felt vaguely as though all this were happening to someone else, to someone she had read about in a book, or had known in remote childhood. The overhanging clouds, the damp grass, the distant ash-tree with the forms of their friends beneath it, all these things seemed to group themselves in her mind, as if answering to some strange dramatic story, which was not the story of her life at all, but of some other harassed and troubled spirit.

In the depths of her mind she shrank away half-frightened and half-indifferent from this man’s impassioned pleading and heroic proposals. The humorously cynical image of the hermit of Dead Man’s Lane crossed her mental vision as a sort of wavering Pharos light in the dreamy twilight of her consciousness. How well she knew with what goblin-like quiver of his nostrils, with what sardonic gleam of his eyes, he would have listened to his rival’s exalted rhetoric.

In some strange way she felt almost angry with this bolder, less cautious lover, for being what her poor nervous Maurice never could be. She caught herself shuddering at the thought of the drastic effort, the stern focussing of will-power which the acceptance of any one of his daring suggestions would imply. Perhaps, who can say, there had come to be a sort of voluptuous pleasure in thus lying back upon her destiny and letting herself be carried forward, at the caprice of other wills than her own.

Mingled with these other complex reactions, there was borne in upon her, as she listened to him, a queer sense of the absolute unimportance of the whole matter. The long strain upon her nerves, of her sojourn in Nevilton House, had left her physically so weary that she lacked the life-energy to supply the life-illusion. The ardour and passion of Andersen’s suggestions seemed, for all their dramatic pathos, to belong to a world she had left—a world from which she had risen or sunk so completely, that all return was impossible. Her nature was so hopelessly the true Pariah-nature, that the idea of the effort implied in any struggle to escape her doom, seemed worse than the doom itself.

This inhibition of any movement of effective resistance in the Pariah-type is the thing that normal temperaments find most difficult of all to understand. It would seem almost incredible to a healthy minded person that Lacrima should deliberately let herself be driven into such a fate without some last desperate struggle. Those who find it so, however, under-estimate that curious passion of submission from which these victims of circumstance suffer, a passion of submission which is itself, in a profoundly subtle way, a sort of narcotic or drug to the wretchedness they pass through.

“I cannot do it,” she repeated in a low tired voice, “though I think it’s generous, beyond description, what you want to do for me. But I cannot do it. It’s difficult somehow to tell you why, James dear; there are certain things that are hard to say, even to people that we love as much as I love you. For I do love you, in spite of everything. I hope you realize that. And I know that you have a deep noble heart.”

She looked at him with wistful and appealing tenderness, and let her little fingers slip into his feverish hand.

When she said the words, “I do love you,” a shivering ecstasy shot through the stone-carver’s veins, followed by a ghastly chilliness, like the hand of death, as he grasped their complete meaning. The most devastating tone, perhaps, of all, for an impassioned lover to hear, is that particular tone of calm tender affection. It has the power of closing up vistas of hope more effectively than the expression of the most vigorous repulsion. There was a ring of weary finality in her voice that echoed through his mind, like the tread of coffin-bearers through a darkened passage. Things had reached their hopeless point, and the two were standing mute and silent, in the attitude of persons taking a final farewell of one another, when a noisy group of village maids, on their dilatory road to the glove-factory, made their voices audible from the further side of the nearest hedge.

They both turned instantaneously to see how this danger of discovery affected their friends, and neither of them was surprised to note that the younger Andersen had left his companion and was strolling casually in the direction of the voices. As soon as he saw that they had observed this manoeuvre he began beckoning to James.

“We’d better separate, my friend,” whispered Lacrima hastily. “I’ll go back to Gladys. She and I must take the lane way and you and Luke the path by the barn. We’ll meet again before—before anything happens.”

They separated accordingly and as the two girls passed through the gate that led into the Nevilton road, they could distinctly hear, across the fields, the ringing laughter of the high-spirited glove-makers as they chaffed and rallied the two stone-carvers through the thick bramble hedge which intervened between them.