And now, during the calm and quiet summer months that followed, my life took its tone from the harmony of Nature, and rested itself for a while in one great calm. Taking its rest like Nature, the better to prepare itself against the advent of stress and storm.

Hardly a day passed during this halcyon time that I did not see Marion. Sometimes it would be at the Rectory, sometimes at the Manor House; oftener still in some cottage where there was sickness or trouble which she could comfort and relieve. To ourselves, at any rate, life in those days was full of interest; it may be, for that very reason, void of interest to those who only watched its progress from without.

One day the rooks re-appeared in the trees of the Manor House farm. I suppose it was one of the periodical visits which they are accustomed to pay, off and on, before they close their summer establishment finally to take up their abode in some mysterious winter residence. In my boyish days it seemed to me the height of unwisdom to abandon your city of habitation just when the winter gales were due. But perhaps a rook lives his real life elsewhere, and only comes down to rusticate in the country as a volunteer or militiaman goes into camp, i.e. for duty’s sake, which, in the case of the rook, means the fatigue duty of rearing and raising a family. Somewhere (in the pages of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ for example) and some day I will look up their winter address. In this neighbourhood it is probably among the cliffs of Portland or on the rock-bound promontory of St. Aldhelm’s Head that a letter would find them. Anyhow, they were with us again to-day.

“Do you think they talk to one another, Peggy?” I said, as they were making a great to-do in the trees adjoining our garden.

“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure; but if they do, it’s pretty much, I allow, on the same subject. Seems like a warning of some kind to my ears.”

“Perhaps it may be, Peggy, and, so far as I can read it, couched in very classical language. It sounds to me exactly like the Latin word ‘cave,’ which your favourite Reggie must often have told you means ‘take care.’ We pronounce the word now-a-days ‘caue,’ which, in the clipt pronunciation of an excited rook, might easily have degenerated into ‘caw.’ If so, they are very lavish of their presentiments at the present moment.”

“And no wonder,” was Peggy’s reply, “for there’s trouble enough and to spare in the village to-day. And will be through all the country round for the matter of that. You know, I suppose, sir, that the bank has failed? There were whispers of it in the street last evening, and to-day the postman tells me that the shutters are up.”

I glanced at the letters on the table before me—at an aggressive-looking blue one in particular, which might possibly contain a bill—a letter of the kind that one ordinarily leaves unopened till the last. In it was a short circular, confirming the fact of the failure in the plain unsympathetic language with which a disaster that spells ruin to hundreds is officially announced.

There are many ways in which a bank may fail, though the result in all of them is pretty much the same in the end. Sometimes it dies of inanition, by a slow decay of life and credit, and this is the form of suicide that novelists and journalists prefer. For it offers a fine field for sensational writing—the whispers in the air, the mysteries and doubts; then the ‘run,’ with all its train of interesting incidents, the reinforcements of gold that are hurried down post haste from London, the noise and tumult of desperate claimants, with the cashier’s final announcement that his resources are exhausted.

Sometimes, on the other hand, the suicide is sudden, without preliminary word or warning—‘foudroyant,’ as the French would call it. And this is how our bank elected to fall. To the last it drew in money and paid it out, and then on a grey November morning the shutters were up, for the bank had died in the night. But for us in Fleetwater there was not even the poor satisfaction of watching its last hours or gazing upon the closed shutters. For the bank had died elsewhere, at the county town some miles away, and the news had only filtered to us at second hand (as Peggy told me) through the postman.

Most people, I suppose, were stunned at first by the novelty of the disaster. I can remember that for some definite period, how long I never knew, I studied the circular before me dreamily, with a strange feeling that it would be bad for some other people, but never realising what it meant for me. “What will Peggy do?” I asked myself. “She had all her savings, I know, invested in it. And what again of Richard Smiley, who only two days ago placed in it all that the Old Inn has earned for him in twenty years?”

Worse still, I thought, for Andrew Strong and his widowed mother, before whom I saw nothing but the refuge of the Union, for they were old and feeble now, and had been living, I knew, for years on the slender pittance they drew in driblets from the bank. And so by degrees, and through many vague wanderings of thought, by realising all that it meant for others, I came at last to realise all that it meant for me.

At this point in my meditations I did what it would have been wiser for me to do a few months earlier, when I should have been in time to act upon the Squire’s advice. I bethought me of turning up the original prospectus of the bank where it had lain forgotten among a number of old papers, mostly unimportant, that had come into my possession at the time of my father’s death. The information that I gained from it was startling. It was to the effect that the company had been registered in shares of £50 each, only half of which had been as yet called up. So I had no need to go to London to win the knowledge that I was a ruined man.This time I did not lose myself in vain misgivings. I had become, I suppose, already somewhat callous to surprise. But I set myself the task of looking the future in the face by thinking and working out my plans on the basis of this new discovery. And I took the business in hand with something of that strange unquestioning instinct which leads the fatalist to work out his destiny in a crisis that has come upon him suddenly, and over which he has lost the control.

Whereby I saw that, under the best possible conditions, I had no right to continue my claim to Marion’s hand. Even now there were rumours afloat in the village that the failure was a bad one, and that the bank would only pay a small dividend. And, though I could not satisfy myself on this point till I had been to London to consult my agents, as I intended to do on the following day, it was already perfectly clear that the company would have to call up all its capital, and that, dividend or no dividend, the result to me would be the loss of most of my small fortune.

And this meant, first of all, the loss of Marion. How could I ask her father to consent to our marriage, even if his opinion on a contingency which was now realised had been less plainly given at the time of our engagement?

No; neither he nor I could have consented to it. And so the failure meant to me the loss of all that, for the time at any rate, made life worth living. Other work I could get, of course; possibly other friends. But a love like Marion’s never again. And, for the time, I could bring myself to think of nothing save the loss of her. I was young, it is true, but not weak, I think, in character; and I could never picture myself in the future as loving another with such love as I had given her. Yet she and I must surely part. The clearest and most decisive judgment dictated it. And I must be the one to go.

Even if I had been content to remain among my present surroundings, every smallest detail of which reminded me of her, yet for her sake my continuance in Fleetwater was impossible. If I stayed, it would mean for her nothing less than banishment from her father and her home.

I had asked the Rector to tell her of my discovery and of the changes that must follow from it. Not yet could I see her personally. Only I asked her to meet me a few hours later for a walk in the adjoining forest. Perhaps that few hours’ interval might tell me in what words to greet her.

With the Rector my arrangements were quickly made. Once put in possession of the facts he saw, clearly as I had done, that I had decided on the only course that was open to me under the circumstances of the case. “No honourable man could have done otherwise,” he said, and, as he grasped my hand at parting, the same kindly look came into his eye that had welcomed me on the first day we met in the Rectory study. Only time and our warm friendship had strengthened it into the look with which a father greets his well-beloved son.