did. Pam said less with her lips, but her eyes were always present in

the heart of the conversation--so frankly and sweetly and freely communicative, and with such beautiful brows of sympathetic understanding playing above them that one never felt any need of the spoken word. Indeed, one did n't even notice it was n't there. That was because she possessed the unconscious subtle faculty of extending her words through manner; of perfuming them, as it were, with her own sweet, ineffable identity, so that what had been a mere brief-spoken monosyllable, unmemorable of itself, became through her a complete sentence in physical expression, memorable for some beautiful phrase of neck or lips, or brows, or all of them together, perhaps, in one melodious gesture.

And after they 'd saturated themselves through and through with the talk of things musical till the girl's eyes were wonder-worlds, swimming gloriously aloft amid whole systems of consonant stars, and the priest was a-hum in every fibre of him with fragmentary bars and snatches of quotation under the gathering force of musical remembrance, like a kettle coming to the boil. After all this they passed in procession over the echoing flagstones into the far room, where was the little sprightly old-fashioned spinster of a Knoll piano, exhaling still a faint pungency of ammonia from its recent ablutions, with new candles in its sconces and an open copy of Rossini's Stabat Mater laid suggestively on its desk, and all its yellow ivories exposed in a four-octave smile of seduction.

And here Pam brought those familiar etceteras of hospitality with which the Spawer had already made acquaintance; and filled the pipe as unconcernedly and as skilfully as though she were a seasoned smoker; and sliced the three rounds of lemon for his Reverence's glass.

And they made music--glorious music--on the little short-compassed upright. They had the concerto, of course--what was written of it--which Pam, nursing intent clasped hands in her lap, with her head erect and her red lips folded and her eyes aglow, adjudged more beautiful the more she heard it. Oh, what a glorious thing it was to be a composer, and have one's head filled with beautiful music in place of other people's ordinary humdrum ideas! And Father Mostyn passed a rhapsodical hand over his shining scalp and said: "Ha! ... makes one long for a few hairs to stand on end in tribute to it. Such music as that seems somehow to be wasted on a bald head."

And they had the A-flat prelude again, that sealed Pam's eyes with the great round tears of remembrance. And the Black Study they had; and some of Bach's Englische Suiten; and bits of Beethoven, the Waldstein; and the III; and part of the "Emperor"; and snatches of Brahms--all just as they came into the Spawer's head, with little illuminative discourses to accompany them--a sort of running verbal analytic programme, as it were. And Father Mostyn gave them reminiscences of Mario and Grisi and Braham and the great Lablache, and sang "I am no better than my Fathers," from Elijah.

Not a bit better, really--if indeed as good.

And the Spawer furnished humorous illustrations of all the great players. De Pachmann, with the high, uplifted finger and exquisite smile; and the statuesque Paderewski, sitting stonily at the piano; and the oblivious Rubinstein; and the imperious Liszt; and the pedagogic Von Buelow; all of them as funny as could be, with real musicianly insight at the back of them; most felicitous examples of instructive comparative criticism.

And Pam had her first lesson this night, and was quite ready to begin the second when that was over; and there seemed not more happiness in Heaven.

*CHAPTER XII*

It was midnight when Pam breathed guarded good-by over her shoulder to Father Mostyn and the Spawer in the roadway, and let herself noiselessly out of their sight through the post-house door.

Up above, in the bedroom that lay over the passage, a rhythmic sonorous sound gave token that the postmaster, at least, was enjoying the abundant fruits of blessed repose. In darkness Pam tiptoed to the little clean kitchen, and cautiously lighting the candle that her own hands had left ready for her on the corner of the dresser, held it gently about her on all sides in final inspection, for the observance of any little neglected duties that might be the better for doing before she took her way to bed. To one side of the fireplace there was the little clothes-horse standing--more, by right, a pony--gaily caparisoned with clocked hose and plain; long stockings and short; grey woollens; unstarched collars; and sundry inspiriting pink and white frilled trappings, that should have given mettle to the sorriest nag alive. Through the internal brightness of remembered music Pam's practical mind went out instinctively to the stockings. She set down her candle, and ran them one by one like gloves over her left hand as far as the foot, working her fingers within the hidden-most recesses of toe and heel for any signs of the wanting stitch. Out of some dozen pairs it wanted in three that forthwith did not return to the little clothes-pony, but went over her left arm in token of unsoundness. With these dangling at her skirt she made quick, noiseless tracks over the kitchen floor to acquire the necessary paraphernalia of repair--for nobody ever recognised the superiority of time present over time past or future better than Pam, or, recognising it, put the recognition to more practical account--and slipping a purposeful finger through the ringed handle of the candlestick, prepared to fetch worsted from the kitchen parlor.

She took the knob in her hand and entered naturally enough, opening the door gently first of all, against any grease-sputtering displacement of air, and keeping watch on the candle's behavior as she brought it round from the shelter of her bosom and passed it in front of her across the threshold. Quite two steps forward she had taken with her eyes on the little yellow flame, before something strange about the feel of the room plucked peremptorily at her attention as though with live fingers, and brought her up on her heel, gazing in front of her, to an involuntary quick-drawn breath of surprise. On the wool mat, in the centre of the square table where they gathered at meals, stood the lamp, still burning dimly, and in the obscurity beyond the lamp, the blur as of a second globe, where a human head lay bowed in the supporting hollow of two pallid hands.

Head and hands of the schoolmaster, beyond a doubt. How well Pam knew them; the long nervous fingers, that always flew to his throat when he addressed her, as though to throttle back the lurking dog of his dislike; the high, bulging forehead, with the compressed temples and the pulse in their veins; the whiteness and brightness of the scalp where the hair should have been. Oh, how Pam had studied them times out of number, like some strange, unlearnable lesson, trying to get them into her head and realise what they meant, and why--but never, perhaps, with her soft eyelashes fringing a greater perplexity than when she looked over them to-night. Never before had Pam found him--or any other of the household--awaiting her arrival when she returned from a late sitting with Father Mostyn. Was he troubled? Was he ill?

It was but a momentary glimpse of him that she caught, with head and hands together; but in that one moment he seemed all these things. The next, while Pam was revolving in her mind whether she should speak his name or cough, or rattle her matches, or depart more softly than she had come--the attitude dissolved. The long spectral fingers slid downwards (so quickly that he might have been merely drawing them across his cheeks when Pam entered) and his body rose from the chair to a standing posture. He gave no look at Pam, though his averted head showed recognition of her presence.

For a second or so there was silence in the room, Pam gazing over her candle at the drawn white face--whiter and more drawn than usual, it seemed to her--with the guilty thought beating within her that once again she had brought herself before this man unwelcomely. Then, seeing that she was the intruder, and that he, risen to full height from the chair, showed no signs of addressing her, or even of actively ignoring her, but stood passive, as though she had summoned his attention and he was simply giving it, without prejudice to any explanation she might wish to make--begged his pardon (for Heaven knows what) in a voice of infinite apology and contrition.

"I hope I have n't disturbed you..." she said. He bit his lip over a strained short "No."

"I did n't mean to. I only came in for some worsted ... Emma used it last. A grey ball with three needles in it, the color of uncle's stockings. May I look for it? ... It 's by the Bible, I think."

Without a word he turned on his heel to the sideboard where the big everyday reading Bible lay, and commenced a silent search. Something about the desolate droop of his thin, threadbare shoulders and the weary aimlessness of his seeking, sent (as his rear prospect always seemed to send) a thrill of spontaneous pity through Pam's heart. Why she pitied him, or exactly what there was about the shiny obverse of him to stimulate the emotion, not for the life of her could she have told.

He was some considerable time with his coat-tails turned towards her, and seemed, by the laborious stooping of his shoulder, quagmired in his search, she suggested--with such gentleness of breathing as would not have rocked the flame of her candle--that perhaps ... if he would let her ... she might be able....

Immediately he spun round from the side cupboard as though she had struck him, with the needles flashing in his hand.

"Is this your worsted?" he said.

"Oh ... thank you so much!"

Her eyes corroborated the color in an instant, and she started forward with grateful extended hand to relieve him of the necessity for coming more than halfway across the kitchen to meet her.

He took the words, but his eyes refused to admit the look. "No thoroughfare" seemed eternally writ up over them. Pam gazed a second at the stern intimation, and then, cuddling her candle to her for departure, turned--softly, so that he might not construe one single grain of anger into her going--for the door. Halfway there she looked back irresolutely over a shoulder, hesitating whether to speak or not.

"Your lamp ... is getting low," at length she ventured. "I think, perhaps ... it may want a little more oil. Shall I refill it for you?" she inquired solicitously. "The smell may give you a headache."

For answer he stooped over the table on both hands and blew out the convulsed flame with two short breaths. A thin, acrid column of smoke from the red wick commenced to wend its way upward, like a soul in tedious migration.

"I am going to bed," he said,

Pam's quick ear caught the sudden collapse of utter weariness in his voice as he said it. Something in the sound of it smote her soul to pity, as though she had had a momentary sight of his shoulders.

"You were not ... sitting up ... for me?" she asked--begged would be a better word.

"Why should I sit up ... for you?" he asked her; and his two hands went up to his collar.

"I don't know ... why you should," she said, plucking her reply to pieces, petal by petal, in soft embarrassment, as though it had been a flower. All the working of his lips, it seemed to her, could not conceal the sardonic amusement her answer stirred in him. Red shame rushed up the slim column of the girl's neck and plunged for hiding in the roots of her hair. "... And of course ... you did n't," she hastened to add.

"Of course."

Whether he repeated her words in mere unconcerned assent, or pressed upon them with the hard knuckle of sarcasm, or was using them interrogatively, Pam could not make sure, nor dared she ask, though she delayed awhile with her eyes fixed for solution upon his face.

"I 'm glad you did n't," she said gently, and in silence led the way into the little clean kitchen. "You will want a fresh candle," she said, putting her own down once more on the dresser, and reaching the empty holder, that by household consent was allowed to pertain to his exclusive use.

Out of a drawer in the dresser she produced a piece of newspaper; tore off a strip; narrowed its width by folding; bound it neatly round the base of the candle; pressed the candle securely into its socket; lighted it from her own, and handed it--after its flame was sufficiently established--to the waiting man.

He took it awkwardly and tardily enough, rocking so long in silence on his feet before acceptance, with head thrown forward and chin bearing heavily over his collar, that for some moments Pam had doubts whether he was not fast asleep and about to fall prone across the outstretched candle and her. But roused at length, as it would seem, by her prolonged gaze of inquiry, he lifted his head and extended an uncertain hand--a hand so uncertain, indeed, that at the first attempt it went wide of the candlestick altogether. At the second, more through Pain's management than his, thumb and finger closed upon it and he turned to go. The look of his dazed eyes and the dry, white lips that rubbed impotently sideways upon each other to shape a soundless "Thank you," sent a great surging tide of solicitous alarm through Pam's bosom. She was after him in a moment.

"Mr. Frewin ... Mr. Frewin.... Are you ill?"

*CHAPTER XIII*

His foot was already on the first step when she urged her bated voice of inquiry after him. He stayed for a moment so, as though he lacked strength to ascend or purpose to speak, and then turned upon her very slowly.

"You ask that," he said, compressing his words through bloodless lips, hard and set. "Don't you know? Can't you see?"

The fixed, meaningful way he looked at her, as though his face were a written answer, and she could read it if she would, and the strange, underlying emphasis of his question, took Pam altogether by surprise. Did n't she know? Could n't she see? All the dread sicknesses under the sun seemed to swathe him and envelope him in their hideous mantles as she gazed ... a fearful kaleidoscopic counterpane of ailments. Which of all these had her blindness overlooked?

Did n't she know? Could n't she see?

"See what?" she begged, in the whispered hush of a voice that besought an answer it scarcely dared to hear. For, framed in the narrow dark inlet of the staircase, with the candle casting corpse-hollows over his eyes, and sinking his cheeks under shadow, and sharpening his nose, and hardening his nostrils--to the girl's disturbed imagination he seemed dead and coffined already. "Oh, tell me, please!--what I ought to see. Oh, I am so sorry! Is there anything you want? Is there anything I can get you?"

"You know what I want," he said, and Lazarus, wakened from the dead, might have spoken his first words in just such a voice.

"_I_ know what you want?" repeated Pam, falling back a little dismayed before the directness of his charge, and the black inability of her mind to meet it.

"... You," he said.

"Me?" said Pam again, more vacantly still, taking the word from him, and trying it in turn, like a key, upon all those sayings that had gone before, to see which of their several senses it might fit and open. Then, all of a sudden she saw the door it opened, and the threshold it led over, and let the key fall, as it were, from her hands, and covered her face hotly with her ten small fingers. "Oh, no, no, no!" she panted. "You don't mean that."

She opened a place in her fingers to look at him through, in the silence that followed, like a fawn staring startled from out the high stalks of a thicket, and let both hands slip downward to her skirts with the limp fall of bewilderment. To think this was the secret of his disfavor; this the reason for all his anger, and all her self-interrogations. That he loved her.

He laid down his candle on the dresser beside her own, and ran the finger of his left hand looseningly round the inner rim of his collar, as though it had suddenly grown tight about him.

"Why not that?" he said, in a voice so low and natureless and hoarse that it might have issued from a man of straw, for all the tone it gave.

"Because ... oh ... because of everything," Pam told him, with troubled eyes and lips and fingers. "I never expected it. It 's all so sudden."

"Sudden," he said.

Pam moved her lips in mournful affirmation. It cut her to the quick to hurt him.

"I 'm afraid so," she said, laying the words soothingly over the raw in his soul. "... Terribly sudden."

"... When it 's been going on ... for two years. Ever since ... I came. You call that sudden?"

"So long as that?" said Pam, in open-eyed amaze. "Oh, I never knew it. Indeed I did n't. I had n't the faintest idea."

He passed his hand across his forehead with a look of pain.

"... And I thought I could n't keep it from you--even when I tried. I fancied you read me through and through, and understood what I wanted to ask of you--but could n't, till now. You looked as though you did. Did n't you? Don't play with me. Tell me. You must have known."

Pam shook a head of pitying negation.

"It was n't that I did n't try," she told him, "... for I tried my best. But I could n't. I never thought ... you cared one little bit about me. If I 'd thought you cared for me ... there are lots of unkind things I 'd never have done that I did do, without thinking. I, would n't have followed you into the room when you were alone, and looked at you, and tried to make you look at me, and spoken to you. Never. You 'll believe I would n't when I say so, won't you? All the time I was only trying to make friends with you--that I was already, though I did n't know it. And all the time you thought ... that I saw what was the matter with you, and knew why you would n't look at me, and what you meant when you turned your back. But I did n't. Indeed I did n't. Oh, how spiteful and cruel you must have thought me," she said, with the beautiful wetness of tears about her lashes. "And I did n't mean it for cruelty a bit. I meant it for kindness. It 's all been a mistake from the first."

"Is it a mistake ... now?" he asked.

"A mistake now?" said Pam, and looked at him for a moment; and then drew a breath, and looked at him again; and drew another breath, and still looked at him; while her lower lip broke loose and fluttered a little, like a hovering butterfly, and stopped, and fluttered a second time, and her lashes fell by an almost imperceptible shade--less a falling of the lashes, indeed, than a falling of something not definable--a thin, gauzy, darkening veil of trouble, it seemed to be, over the very look itself. "I hope not," she said; but her voice and her eyes and her lips belied the hope she spoke of. "We understand each other now ... don't we?"

"What do we understand?" he asked huskily.

"I thought you knew," Pam said, setting her gaze on him, in intrepid wonderment to think he should comprehend so badly, or so soon forget. "I 've just ... been telling you."

"I know nothing," he said, and then in a sudden husky outburst of avowal: "There is only one thing I want to know. I 've told you what it is. Have you nothing to say in return?"

The unavailing exertion of trying to raise his lead-heavy voice clear of a low whisper made him stop to cough--the hard, dry cough that weeks of patient nursing and nights of anxious solicitude had taught Pam to know so well.

"Nothing ... that I should like to say," Pam answered unsteadily. "Nothing that you would wish to hear me say. I thought ... I 'd said everything. Oh, please ... don't ask me to say any more. It might only make things worse."

He swallowed time upon time in slow succession.

"And this is the end of all my waiting?"

"If you 'll let it, please, it is," Pam begged him, very pleadingly for herself; very sorrowfully for him.

"I can't let it," he blurted after a while. "You don't know what you are asking of me. I can't give you up."

"But I 'm not yours to give," Pam protested, with an awed voice, at this unexpected assumption of possession.

"Whose are you?" he cried

"Nobody's, of course," Pam said, in meek submission, "except my own."

"You could be mine ... if you would," he told her, grappling with his throat again. "Just for the saying of a word you could. I 've waited for you for two years. Is one word too much to give ... for two years' waiting?"

"Ginger waited for me longer than that," Pam said, very simply. "And I said 'No' to Ginger."

"Who was Ginger, to want you?" he exclaimed. "You could never have married Ginger."

"I did n't," said Pam quietly. "But Ginger loved me."

"I love you," he said fiercely.

"Ginger loved me first," Pam maintained stoutly. "And others loved me before Ginger. If I 'd said to them what they wanted me to say to them and what you want me to say to you, there would never have been any question of your asking me."

"Why did n't you let me die ... when I had the chance?" he demanded bitterly. "But you were kind to me then. You took advantage of me. You were kind when I was ill and could n't help myself. Death stood as near to me as I stand to you ... but day and night you stood between us both and saved me."

"Oh, no, no!" Pam disclaimed hastily, in twofold fear and modesty, shrinking before the acceptance of such an obligation. "It was n't I that saved you. It was you yourself that got strong and better. I only sat by you and did what little I could; but it was nothing at all ... really."

"Nothing at all," he said, and clenched his fist in assurance. "It was everything. Why did I get stronger and better--but for you? Because you were by me, and because I wanted you ... and could n't bear to leave you. Look," he said, standing back from her suddenly, as though to give her full view of his statement, "do you know there were times ... times when I could have turned my face to the wall and died for the mere wishing?"

"But you would never have done that," Pam whispered, in hushed alarm.

"Why should n't I have done it?" he asked her, "... when death was so easy and living so hard? You alone stopped me from doing it. The thought of you and the sight of you, and the hope of you. Often and often I was looking at you ... when you thought I was asleep."

"Sometimes I saw you," said Pam.

"... And making up my mind whether to die ... or risk living ... for your sake. But I never could die ... because of you. And once, when you had been a long while gone ... I said to myself: 'How easy to slip off now ... before she comes back' ... and just as I was wondering whether there would be time ... you came in, and stooped over me and kissed me. How could I die after that? Once I made up my mind to kiss you back ... but my lips had n't strength. You saw them move, and asked me if I wanted a drink, and I said 'Yes'; but I did n't. And you cried over me, too."

"I was sorry for you," said Pam. "I wanted you to get better."

"Are n't you sorry for me now?" he asked. "... Now that my mind is ill ... as my body was then?"

The terrible earnestness of his love troubled her. Love before she had witnessed in plenty, but never love like this. It was as though she stood with clasped hands before some burning homestead that her own unintending fingers had fired, and saw the fierce wind fan the flames, and heard the cry for succor from within ... and could do nothing. Oh, it was horrible! For a while they looked at each other and said nothing, for each feared speaking; he, lest he might divert Pam's answer; Pam, because she had no answer to divert.

"Well?" he said at length. "Have you nothing to say to me?"

Pam only shook her head. What had she to say, and how could she say it when her own great heart was hammering away like a stone-mason in the place where her voice should have been.

"Not even a word?" he said, with a broken sob. "Won't you say ... you 'll try and care for me ... if I can make you? Is it too much to ask that?"

Pam put her hands to her face.

"Oh ... I don't know. What am I to say? What am I to do?"

"... Do nothing," he said bitterly.

"But I want to do something," Pam protested desperately--though her own shrinking conscience told her how little. "... And I don't say I won't try. But perhaps ... I could never learn. I don't know. How am I to know? And if I say I 'll try ... and can't in the end ... what a dreadful thing for us both.... Oh, are you quite sure there 's nothing short of love that will do?" she asked, with the lameness that can get no further, and wrenched her hands, and looked at him in helpless appeal.

"That means you won't try?" he said; and she could see his hand close tight upon the dresser.

"Oh, no, no, no ... I will try!" Pam cried, charging blindly down the open roadway of consent, for fault of any other way to turn. "... If you wish it, I 'll try. But oh, please, it is n't the least bit of a promise ... and you must n't ... must n't build on it. And you must n't try and force me to learn ... or be angry with me if I 'm slow ... or can't. Perhaps I can't. Oh, it may very well be that I can't ... for all my trying.

"... And even ... if I ever grew to care anything for you ... in the way you want--and I dare n't think or say. It all seems so sudden and unreal. It seems as though I were dreaming it. Last night--half an hour ago even--I never thought you wanted to speak to me or have anything to do with me at all, and now--you 're asking me to try and love you. And even if I grow to care for you in that way (and I don't know. Oh, you must n't think I 'm promising) I should n't want ... I mean it would have to be ... oh, for a long time. Years, perhaps. Longer than ever you cared to wait. I told ... somebody once, when they asked me--what you 've been asking me, that I never meant to get married. And if I did ... it would be like acting a story to them--as they said I was doing at the time. And I 've said 'No' to such lots of others too ... and now to say 'Yes' to anybody (and I 'm only saying half 'Yes'--only a quarter 'Yes'--to you) seems, somehow, like breaking faith. It seems mean ... and unfair. And anyway it could n't ... could n't possibly be yet. Could n't be for ever such a long time. Perhaps you 'd never want to wait so long as that."

"Wait?" He thrust out his hand desperately to shut this dangerous back-door of her concession. "With you at the end of my waiting ... I would wait till the Judgment Day."

The dreary, dogged patience of the man's passion chilled Pam. It rose up high in her mind like an awesome black monument of Patience, and cast its great shadow over the brightness of her life--on and on and on interminably, out of sight to the dull sun-setting of her clays. If she could have recalled her words then. If she could have had the strength, the moral strength, to throw him aside from her then and there--at never mind what momentary cost to their feelings. All her soul, she knew, was striving impotently to cast off the encumbrance of him--but the strength was lacking. Strength to be cruel; strength to be kind. Because she could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment required with her own hand ... she was throwing herself contemptibly upon the protection of the Future; making herself the Future's ward, and trusting, in some blind, unreasoning fashion, that her guardian would be responsible for her when the time came, and do for her what she had lacked the daring to do for herself, and free her without consequence (if so needed), and deal happiness all round with that lavish hand for which the Future is, and has been, and ever will be, so extolled.

Wild, fatal fantasy of Pam's--that she shared in common with every man, woman, and temporising child of this self-deluded, procrastinating world. For the Future is that dread witch that, appearing first under the guise of a sweet and amiable old lady, turns suddenly into the red-eyed, horrid old hag of to-day.

But alas! The compact was drawn and signed and sealed. What consequence that Pam imposed a hundred feverish reservations and supplications, and qualifications and amendments, and loopholes and contingencies upon her little old lady in the signing--and seemed to be granted them every one? Into this little old lady's house she signed herself for all that, and henceforth all her goings and comings, and sleepings and wakings were no longer her sweet own, as heretofore, but under the authority and subject to the control of the little sweet amiable old lady--who was only biding her good time (as you may be sure) to snap into the horrid, red-eyed hag we wot of, and fall upon Pam with the black venom of her malignant nature.

All through the remaining hours till dawn and daylight the cough of the schoolmaster rang out monotonously, dull and muffled, from beneath the bedclothes like a funeral bell, and Pam, the only other awake in that household to hear it, lay and listened to its tolling with great, wide eyes staring at the darkness of the ceiling, and at the darkness beyond the foot of the bed, and at the darkness where the door was, and sometimes passionately into the smothered darkness of her own pillow, and said to herself, with a wondering horror:

"When daybreak comes ... shall I wake?"

*CHAPTER XIV*

Green July, gliding smoothly on the noiseless axles of its diurnal wheels, gives way at last to golden August, and beneath the assiduous burning of the sun the cornfields begin to brown like the crust of a pasty under the brasing iron. It is the mystic eve of harvest, that consummation of the farmer's year, and all the countryside is palpitating with it. Everywhere the talk is of cutting, and men, on meeting, cast anxious eyes from each other's faces to the sky and ask:

"Will it 'owd [hold], think ye?"

And while this vast metamorphosis of color is creeping over the land, and the countryside seems beating like a breast towards the consummation of its great purpose, Pam and the piano and the Spawer and Father Mostyn grow daily into a bond of deeper sympathy, and the wondrous ripening process, so visible in externals, is going on no less surely within their own hearts. On the little cracked Vicarage piano Pam practises assiduously, and such is her zeal for the labor, and such her sense of loyal gratitude to the setter of it and her desire to fulfil his instructions that, by sheer force of love alone, she keeps pace with what he teaches and wins his admiring praise for her progress. Sometimes they gather at Father Mostyn's, cutting into chicken-pies one night and finishing them off another. Sometimes Father Mostyn and Pam walk up to Cliff Wrangham for the benefit of the better piano, and compare the Archdeaconess's cookery--without comment, and very kindly--and are set back by the Spawer, filled with music and affection.

A state of things which greatly indignates the orphan Mary Anne, who cries aloud to herself:

"Is there nawbody good enough for 'im at Cliff Wrangham bud 'e mun gan 'is ways an' fetch 'em fro' Oolbrig?"

And every morning, with the habit of second nature, the Spawer goes forth and sits on the lane gate about Pam's time, and feels a sense of emptiness somewhere--as though he 'd gone without his breakfast--when she does n't come. But when she does, and he sees her hat or her blue Tam-o'-Shanter sailing briskly along the hedgerow, his released expectancy curls up into smiles like stretched wire, and he strolls to meet her as though his face had never known doubt, and accompanies her henceforth to the end of her journey, so that the girl's brisk walk, divided now between the two of them, is a gentle amble scarcely quicker than Tankard's 'bus that daily rumbled through Ullbrig.

Their communion on these occasions, as at all times, is simple and sacred. The perspicacious reader who has been preparing for tender dialogues full of love and its understanding will have to suffer the penalty of his perspicacity, for the sweet trivialities of love are in no way touched upon. They talk of music; of struggles with "flesh" of technique; of composition; of the meaning of music--if it has any. They talk of French, and they talk French, of the recognised question and answer pattern, till Pam gains quite a vocabulary of sea-coast words, and could make herself understood intelligibly--and certainly prettily--to any Frenchman on any cliff you like to name. And they talk quite sincerely about the sea and the blueness of it; and bend down their heads for the better appreciation of this great round bubble of color; and draw each other's attention to clouds, to bees, to butterflies, and nameless insects fluttering by. At other times, the Spawer talks to her of his student life abroad and of his present-day ambitions; the sort of glory he covets and the sort of glory by which he sets no store. And the talk is of composers and schools of composers; and players and schools of players--thick as shoals of herrings--till Pam, who never forgets a precious word of what this deified mortal tells her, but can reproduce its exact use and inflection for her own hearing at any future time, is full to the red lips with critical discernments and differentiations, and could astonish any wandering, way-logged musician who might, for the sake of illustration, be presumed to find himself in the district, and open subject of his own business with this sweet girl stranger under her Government bag.

Sometimes, towards the end of an evening at Father Mostyn's, the Doctor drops in upon them casually, introducing himself with the invariable "Don't let me distairrb ye"--though it is known he comes for whist. Music appeals to him about as meaningfully as a German band to a stray dog; and being a Scotchman, he says so in the fewest words wherein this hard truth can be contained, nor ceases to manifest a lurking distrust of the piano until they are safely squared round the card-table, and the cards are being cut. In his own Scotch way he is as fond of Pam as can be, and on the strength of this tacit affection asks her bluntly to do whatever he may happen to be in need of at the time.

"Ye 'll hae to gie me another match, Pam," he says unconcernedly, as he deals, without looking at her. "A 'm no alicht yet."

And when she offers it to him, already lighted, he merely holds his pipe-bowl towards her from his mouth, as a matter of course, scooping up his cards and drawing vigorously, while Pam applies the flame, till combustion is effected, when he draws his mouth away.

"Clubs are trumps," says he.

Pam does n't mind his disregard of her in the least, for you see he does n't mean anything by it, being a Scotchman; but she would enjoy these games better if the exigencies of play did not always pit her against the Spawer, inasmuch as she and he, being the two weak members of the quartette, can never be partnered against such past masters as his Reverence and the Doctor. Eventually, since it proves itself the most equable division of the table, she comes to be the accepted partner of the latter, who does not hesitate to acquaint her, with cutting directness, of any discrepancy in her play.

"What the deil made ye lead trumps, Pam?" he demanded of her, in blank surprise, on one occasion. "Did ye no see me look at ye last time Father Mostyn led them?"

He is a typical hardy Scotsman, all sinew and gristle, and raw about the neck, and thinks little--if indeed at all--concerning dress. For the most part, you will see him bicycling about the roads in meagre knickerbockers that were trousers when he first came to Ullbrig, blue stockings, and heavy-soled boots, with the tags sticking off them like spurs. In other respects, he is a reader of profane literature and avowed sceptic. Between him and his Reverence the Vicar is a standing feud of opinion, which finds vent in many an argumentative battle royal. At the end of one of these tremendous conflicts, that would almost be hand-to-hand at times but for the pacific whiskey-bottle between them, the Doctor rises to his feet, buttons his coat-collar as a preliminary to departure, and cries vehemently:

"Hey, mon, but there 's na driving sense nor reason into ye. Hand over the whiskey, and I 'll be gone. Ye 're as stubborn as Balaam's donkey."

"Ha! with the same authority, dear brother," his Reverence answers blandly.

"And what authority will that be, pray?" asks the Doctor, bending the stiff neck of the whiskey-bottle towards his tumbler, as though it were his Reverence he had hold of.

"Divine authority, dear brother," says Father Mostyn. "Divine authority."

"Divine authority," says the Doctor. "... Wi' yer meeracles. Mon, hae ye ever hairrd a donkey speak?"

"Ha! frequently, frequently," murmurs his Reverence, focussing a distant point of space through his eyelashes, and waltzing softly, without animus, to and fro in his foot radius.

"Ah 'm no speakin' pairsonally, ye understand," the Doctor says, with a tinge of remonstrance for levity, "but it will hae been in the pulpit ye have hairrd it. Mon, hae ye never read Hume on the Meeracles? Are ye no conversant wi' your Gibbon? D' ye pretend to tell me ye are ignorant o' such men as Reenan and Strauss, and Bauerr and Darrwin, and Thomas Huxley?"

"Estimable people, no doubt, Friend Anderson," the Vicar tells him imperturbably. "... Estimable people."

"Ah doot ye 've read a wurrd of them," the Doctor pronounces bluntly.

"So much the better for me, dear brother. So much the better for me."

"Mon," says the Doctor, exasperated by this equanimous piety that all his own exasperation cannot exasperate. "... Ye 're a peetifu' creature, an' ah feel shame tae be drinkin' the whiskey o' such as you. Ye go inta chairrch and fill a lot o' puir eegnorant people wi' mair ignorance than they had without ye, teachin' them your fairy tales about apples and sairrpints, and women bein' made oot o' man's ribs (did one ever hearr the like!). Let's awa', an' mind dinna tek inta yer heid ta fall sick this week, or it 'll go harrd wi' ye if ah 'm called."

"Ha! We can die but once, Brother Anderson," the priest tells him cheerfully. "Even all the science and medical skill in the world can't kill us more than that."

And so the moments of these four pass, and the harvest hour approaches, inwardly and outwardly, until at last ... one day...

But in the meanwhile, for all this life of external happiness that Pam shared with others, she was serving her silent apprenticeship in the house of the little old lady. Even when he was furthest from her the schoolmaster clung close to her mind. Each time she laughed, each time she looked into the Spawer's face, each time she spoke with him she saw inside her--but as plainly as though she had been looking at him in the flesh--the dark figure of the schoolmaster regarding her in mute reproof, with hands to throat and beating temples. The brightest moments of her happiness, indeed, threw this shadow blackly across her mind like the gnomon of a dial when the sun shines clearest. Whenever she returned now from Father Mostyn's or the Spawer's, he was always there sitting up for her. Heaven knows why, for they had little enough to say to one another. He never pressed himself upon her, but by leaving himself to her good pity she felt the claim of him tenfold--lacking the power to withhold what, perhaps, on demand, she might have summoned courage to deny. Always he was dumbly set, like those canvas collecting sheets on Lifeboat Saturdays, for the smallest coppers of her kindness. If she had not looked into the larger kitchen before bed she knew he would never have revealed himself, but she had not the heart to ignore one as little courageous for the winning of her love as she was herself for its defence. At times the thought of what the future had in store for her troubled her so darkly that she knew not how best to shape her present moments. Therefore, in place of shaping, she merely whittled--for every cut this way, a cut that; for every chip off one side, a chip off the other; so that though the rough wood she worked on wore nearer down to her fingers, it assumed no shape. Through fear of having been too cruel one day she was constantly over-kind the next; and then, what she had lacked to charge in cruelty to him she charged extortionately to herself, paid the bills in silence, and said never another word. But though she could meet these little daily expenditures, there was a great bill slowly mounting, she knew, which should of a surety one day be presented to her. And who should pay that? Who should pay that?

While the music is at Father Mostyn's and the Spawer's she feels to a certain extent in harbor against the evil day. But what shall happen when this harbor is denied her, and for fault of its protection, she must sail out into the open, unprotected sea? What will betide her then? What is life coming to?

Alas! She is soon to know.

One day....

*CHAPTER XV*

One day the Spawer wakes up suddenly to consciousness, like Barclay in the hedge bottom, and discovers, as his friend Barclay has not infrequently discovered before him, that he is occupying a strange and uncomfortable position. It was on a Tuesday when he made the final effort and awoke definitely to an actual sense of his location, but he had been blinking at it unseeingly for some while before that. The previous morning Father Mostyn had taken leave of Ullbrig for his few days' annual pike fishing with the Rev. the Hon. Algernon Smythe Trepinway in Norfolk, and this sudden break in the continuity of existence had served as an alarum to the Spawer's long slumber. He woke reluctantly, but with purpose, took his morocco red bathing drawers, his towel and his stick, and without pausing to any appreciable length at the lane gate, plunged across the two fields towards the cliff.

It was a glorious, steadfast blue day. Not a cloud as big as the puff of my lady's powder-box showed itself in any corner of the sky. No breezes, even of the softest, filtered through the hot hedges, or cooled the parched tips of the burning grass blades. Without intermission the sun poured his golden largess down upon the earth from on high, so forcefully that wherever the sunlight rested, it was as though a great hot hand were imposing its weight. Yesterday the harvesting had set in with a vengeance, and now the whole air was a-quiver with the whir of busy blades, whose tireless activity seemed the very music made for slumber, and lulled all other moving things towards somnolent repose.

The beach lay out dazzling in its unbroken smoothness, like white satin, and deserted quite. Not another footstep than his own had been, or in all probability would be, there that day to tread destructive perforating tracks over its beautiful surface of sand. Up and down, for something like a dozen clear miles of coast, or so far as his eyes could show him, he seemed, like a second Robinson Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed. The true spirit of the solitude of the lower Yorkshire coast is here. There is no elaboration to the picture; it is plain and lacking detail. Of foliage by the sea there is not a leaf, excepting mere divisional hedges. Fields in cultivation and out of it run to the very edge of the cliff--a sombre cliff of soft, dark earth, stained here and there to unprepossessing rusty red, with trickling chalybeate streams, and showing terrible toothmarks of the voracious sea, that feeds its way inland on this part of the coast at the rate of a yard a year. Looking over the brink of it you can discern as many as half a dozen paths, in various stages of subsidence, that less than that number of years ago led people along the cliff top as the path you stand on leads them now. In other places you may see huge slices of grass land, descending like great steps downwards to the shore in their progress towards ultimate devourance, while warning fissures across the existing pathway show where, perhaps this very winter, another step will be detached and added to the never-ending stairway of demolition.

In a sheltered inlet, where the sea has swept up a thick white carpet of bleached sand, the Spawer pitches his bathing camp this morning. On other occasions he has trod down here more gladsomely; the sea, murmuring its musical cadences upon a lonely beach, has not made music to him in vain. But for him to-day the sun is a little dim, the sea a little jaded. The inward content that stood interpreter between his soul and his outward worldly joyance is gone from him, and he stands somehow like a stranger in the presence of strange things. Here on the seashore, he has come to play a duet more full of emotion, and more crowded with difficulties than any he knows within the province of music, for it is a duet with his own soul.

In a sense, dimly and vaguely, he has comprehended for a day past, a couple of days past, at the most--Lord help him--a week, that this duet was inevitable. He has been, indeed, since these several days, two men. The second was better than the first, but not much. The second of them held the strings of the conscience bag (slackly, however) and rattled it ominously--though more as a warning, if the truth were told--to give the first his chance of escape. In the heart of the second (if heart it could be called) there lingered a sneaking sympathy with the delinquent first, as for a younger brother. And now, after a mutual game of hide-and-seek, when the one would not look while the other showed, and the other would not show while the other was looking, through a kind of desperate conviction that something must be done, they had sneaked their two ways down to the beach this morning, prepared (though only badly) to declare themselves to one another, and come to some understanding, though whether this understanding should be creditable or discreditable to both or to either was yet unsettled.

By what subtle, imperceptible paths has he outjourneyed the territory of that great happiness which seemed so lately his, to find himself all suddenly in this unpleasant no-man's land of the imagination? By subtle, imperceptible paths indeed. By the touch of hands; by the gazing of eyes; by the inflection of voice. Time was, in the early days it was, when he could look on Pam's fascinating sprinkling of freckles with an eye as purely interested, and as purely disinterested, as though they had been the specklings of a wild bird's egg. He had begun by making a friend of her. He had come ultimately to regard her as a sister, to whom he had acted in all good faith the strong, reliant, reliable, affectionate, unemotional elder brother--who could have kissed her, and thought no more of that kiss, nor prepared his lips for kisses to come. And now ... what was he going to make of her next? ... of himself? Who but a brother can act the brother? Who but a father--even though he doddle benevolently on his legs and have respectable white hairs--can be sure of acting the father to any daughter not his own? What are the sexes but phosphorus and sandpaper for the kindling of love's emotion? Already the phosphorus had not wanted signs of impending ignition. Just a very little more rubbing of this friendly intercourse--a day or two ... a week at most ... and the flame would burst out for them both to see. So here let him settle it. What was he going to do?

He did not know what he was going to do.... There were complications.

Complications of his own allowing, remember. Why had he not let it be plainly understood--as soon as his relations with this girl grew--that he was a man with a claim upon him?

Ah! If only he had.

Why had n't he? Had he shirked it? If he had shirked it, then he was indeed guilty.

He did not think he had shirked it ... at least, with intention.

But the idea had come to him. Come to him more than once. Did he not on one occasion at Hesketh's corner make the resolve to tell the girl that he was going to be married?

Yes.

Then why did n't he?

Because he could think of no expression at the time to relieve the news of a certain primitive brutality--a blunt statement quite out of accord with the moment and the mood.

Thought must always be in some measure of accord with the moment and the mood. You could not say, for instance: "Good morning. What a beautiful day. I am going to be married."

But he had thought the same thought subsequently.

True.

Why had he not acted on it?

Partly for the same reason. And then again ... it seemed so easy in thought and so difficult in effect. He was frightened he might bungle it, and make it sound like an unpalatable caution to the girl. "Don't set your aspirations upon me. I warn you. I am not for you." Faugh! The idea--in this girl's case--was revolting.

Because, therefore, of a little unpleasantness on account, he had run up a long score--prepared to declare himself bankrupt when occasion arose, and involve the girl in his own insolvency. Was that it?

He had certainly avoided anything that might be odious to the girl ... or painful to her feelings--but he had had no ideas of involving her. God forbid!

And the other? The Absent One? What had been his feelings towards her? Had he thought his conduct such as to merit her confidence in him?

He had not thought it undeserving of her confidence. Their relations were of long standing. Before now he had kissed some mutual girl friends in her presence. She had smiled.

Supposing he had kissed them in her absence ... and she had come subsequently to hear of it? Would she have smiled? Of course he had told her in his letters all about the post-girl--and their present relations?

He had told her the postman was a girl.

Exactly. But what sort of a girl.

Was there more than one sort of a girl? A girl, it seemed to him, was a girl all the world over. The definition was plain enough.

Had he said she was a pretty girl?

Why should he have said that?

Why should he have avoided it?

He had n't avoided it. It was only one of the things he had n't ... specified. Why should he specify a "pretty girl" any more than he should have specified an "ugly one"? Besides ... prettiness was all abstract, and relative, and indefinable. When we called a thing pretty we only meant that it excited that particular degree of emotion in our own mind. Other people might decide upon it as ugly.

Exactly. Had he, by any chance, spoken of Cliff Wrangham as a delightful corner of the world's end?

He believed he had.

And he had mentioned Father Mostyn?

Certainly. He had alluded to him.

In affectionate and laudatory terms?

He did n't know about affectionate and laudatory terms. Perhaps he had. He had spoken of him as he bad found him. Father Mostyn had always been kind. In writing he had no doubt alluded to that kindness.

More than once?

Doubtless more than once. Kindness was not such a common quality that it would not bear a little repetition.

He had mentioned the Doctor.

Some of him. His stockings, he believed, and his strange happiness in speaking the truth.

How often had he met the Doctor?

Perhaps half a dozen times.

And the post-girl?

Let him see....

Exactly. He could n't count the number. He had mentioned with some small degree of detail a man who was but a cypher in his visit, and he had overlooked altogether the figure which was its numerator, so to speak.

Suppose he had put the case, as it stood, before a referee, chosen from the Sons of the World. Suppose he 'd said, for instance: There was a fellow once, engaged to a girl. The girl went with a maiden aunt by marriage to Switzerland for the aunt's health. It was arranged that while they were there the fellow was to go into obscurity by the sea-coast and complete some great compositional work he had the vanity to think he could achieve, and that, after the girl's return, either towards the end of November or the early part of January, these two were to be married. But during this obscurity the fellow came upon an altogether unusual sample of a post-girl. She was supposed to be derived from a family of importance; had all the inherited gifts of a lady; the low, musically-balanced voice; the symmetrical, graceful figure and carriage; beautiful teeth and a smile like dawn. Suppose everything about the girl appealed to this fellow tremendously. Suppose they became ... well, call it friends. Suppose he taught her music and French, and met her as often as possible. Suppose all his moments were occupied in thinking of her. Suppose the life he had left and the life (presumably) he was going back to were receded so far away that he could scarcely distinguish them, or his obligations to them. Suppose that the girl was to all intents and purposes his little cosmos, out of which he indited letters to the Other Girl--letters that made no mention of the existing state of things. Suppose, now, he laid this case, just as it stood, before any man of the world. What, did he imagine, would that man of the world decide upon him? What would he think of him?

Another man of the world, perhaps.

Probably so. And suppose this other girl had been his sister, and he had been some other man, and the circumstances were as they were, and some enlightened friend had informed him of them. Well?

On the face of it, he might be tempted to step in and send the fellow to the devil.

And in his own case?

In his own case? Summarising like that, without any partiality, but condensed into a cold-blooded abstraction, he supposed he might seem deserving of being sent to the devil, too--if he were not there already. Every case looked black when it was formularised. The facts had accumulated without his perceiving them. It was easy now to go and roll them up like an increasing snowball of accusation against him, but at the time they had seemed slight enough. When he had scribbled off the letters it had been with a consciousness of the shuffle, but with the inward resolve, clearly defined, to atone for it by a longer letter next day, or some other day.

And he had done so?

Unfortunately, no. Fate, there again, had seemed against him. But the intention had not been wanting--it was the flesh only that had been a little weak.

In the light of present understanding, then, if by the mere wish he could blot out not only the remembrance of this weakness but the actuality of it, he would wish the wish?

No reply.

Eh? He would wish the wish at once--was n't that so?

Still no reply.

Perhaps he had n't quite understood. Put it another way. Suppose, since the doings of these latter days were not entirely creditable to him, when viewed dispassionately, was he prepared to wish that he had never come to Cliff Wrangham?

He could n't honestly wish that. It was n't fair to Cliff Wrangham or the Dixons. He 'd had a very happy time there and done good work. Cliff Wrangham was n't to blame.

Since Cliff Wrangham was n't to blame, then, would he be prepared to wish that he had never come across the post-girl?

He 'd have been bound to come across her.

Not if, for instance, she 'd been ill, and somebody else had brought the letters.

He would n't wish anybody ill for the mere sake of saving his conscience.

Supposing she had been away, then?

Away where?

Anywhere.

But she had n't been away, and so there was an end of it. He was n't dealing with what might have been, but what was.

And what was?

He did n't know. He only knew that he would n't wish his worst enemy to be on the rack as he 'd been on it all last night, and this morning. He had n't slept a wink.

Why had n't he slept?

Because he could n't sleep.

But surely that was funny.

It was n't funny at all. It was hell.

How could that be? If he found now that he 'd been taking a wrong moral turn, all he had to do was to turn back. His way was easy.

Was it?

It was ... if he were sorry he 'd gone wrong. Was he sorry that he 'd gone wrong?

Of course he was sorry. The difficulty was he 'd gone such a deuce of a long way wrong.

Ah! Longer, perhaps, than he 'd said.

Not longer than he 'd said, but quite long enough, without saying a word. To turn all the way back, at this stage of the proceedings--with explanation or without--was a desperately hard thing to do.

If duty compelled it, nevertheless?

Why should duty compel him to do anything so unpleasant?

But surely that was a strange way to speak of a duty which merely implied his obligation to the Other Girl. Presumably, as things stood, he loved her.

Presumably he did.

He had come to love her of his own free will? It was not a case where he had been "rushed"? There was no solicitous mother or obliging sister in the case?

None at all. Only he had had larger opportunity to cultivate her acquaintance than in the general run of affairs. She was a distant connection of his by a remote marriage, who, in view of her extreme personal connection with the family, had generally ranked as a cousin. In the days when he had had prospects from his uncle they were constantly thrown together, and it was in those days that he engaged himself. All the family looked with favor upon the match, and even encouraged it. Then this wretched old uncle took it suddenly into his head to be actively interested in the nephew's welfare. Wanted him to throw music to the winds as being unworthy of his high prospects, and went the length of telling him in a letter of six words or so to choose between music and the mammon of unrighteousness. Fool, perhaps, that he was, he chose for music. All his family rounded on him at once--or such family as it was; thank God, there was n't much of it--and wrote abject letters to the mammon, telling him how headstrong poor dear Maurice was, and how darling uncle must please give him time, and not be too severe upon his wicked indiscretion. Maurice, dear misguided boy, loved darling uncle very dearly, and would be shocked one day when he came to his senses, and saw how deeply he had grieved him.

And the Other Girl? Did she share the family reproaches?

On the contrary, she said he had acted nobly. He offered her her freedom, of course, as soon as he relinquished the mammon, but she would not accept it.

Had she said to him, for instance: "Dear Maurice, there have been times when I have been troubled to know which of you I loved; you or your uncle's money. And now that the horrid money 's gone, I think it 's you."

Yes, she had said that.

Did he tell her that it was n't for beggars to be choosers, and that if she cared to have a musical pauper she could have him, and there 'd be nothing to pay but his bills?

He believed he had made some witty allusion to that effect.

What did he call pauperdom?

He called two or three hundred a year pauperdom. With the assistance of a few pot-boiling songs under somebody else's name, including, to his shame be it said, a percentage of semi-sacred effusions with angels fluttering in the treble, and organ obligato, he generally managed to supplement this. He also wrote a few elementary teaching pieces for a certain educational firm, under the reassuring title of Ivan Fedor Ivanowitch, which returned him a pittance. There was no demand for his two symphonies or his orchestral suite or his first piano concerto in _fa diese_. That 's why he was writing another. Altogether, taking one thing with another, his income might be set down--except to the Inland Revenue--at about three hundred and fifty pounds a year. A man could n't be much poorer than that, and talk, Heaven help him, of marriage.

And the Other Girl? Had she expectations at all?

He hoped not, for her own peace of mind. She had this aunt by marriage. Perhaps she might be able to call a couple of hundred pounds per annum her own some day. But it would n't be much more.

And how long had she been engaged to him?

Oh, he could n't exactly say. Six or seven years. It had been an early and a lingering engagement.

Taking his statements into admission, one thing seemed very clear. He was under a strong moral obligation to the Other Girl.

He had never denied it.

Perhaps not, but his actions--judged superficially, of course--had shown a large tendency to overlook this obligation. However, let the past bury the past. He saw now the right way, and where he had strayed from it. Henceforth, since his sole desire was to purge his spirit of its temporary faithlessness, and gain grace to win back his claim to the Other Girl's confidence, henceforth his path lay clear.

Where?

Where? Surely he had no necessity to ask that?

On the contrary, he did ask that.

But there could be no doubt in his mind. Any way that did not lead him back into the old temptation was the right way.

If coming across the post-girl was temptation, there was no way in this district that did lead the right way.

Then he must depart to where there was.

Leave Cliff Wrangham altogether?

Precisely.

Why should he leave Cliff Wrangham--that is, before the Other One returned? Was he an infant that he must be packed off into the corner in disgrace, because he could n't be trusted?

He had proved himself an infant by the mere fact that he was no longer to be trusted. In other words, he had broken his trust.

He denied it. He 'd broken nothing.

When a nursemaid, who 's been warned, lets a child....

Oh, damn the nursemaid and the child, too! Serve it jolly right if she did. He was n't a nursemaid.

Perhaps not. Perhaps he was just a low, common blackguard, after all.

Perhaps he was.

He had his bath, but the salt water was all unfriendly, and there was no stimulus in its waves. It seemed to have deserted him at this hour of dark temptation. In ceaseless tussle the two of him returned along the sands and slowly back to Dixon's. Out of the drifting current of reasonings two things at least seemed clear. The conscience-bearer was dimly arguing for departure; the shuffling second self, that had been actively dodging investigation all this while, was trying to invent counter-arguments for delay.

The very life he was leading had become dear to him. He had lost slowly the desire to regain touch with the big centres of artistic activity, and seemed to be living somehow a purer life, in which he worked solely (or at least, thought so) for Art's own sake. The ultimate success of this concerto troubled him little. Before, he had been building much on it, as the most promiseful fruit of his muse. Now, if it were scouted, if he and all his labors were scouted, there was the blessed sense of being able to return here for solace and shelter. The Dixons would be sorry to lose him, he felt sure; glad to have him back. The Vicarage door would open as soon as his figure came on to the vicarial territory in front of the iron rails; the bland, beneficent hand of his Reverence would receive him, like the lost lamb gathered into the fold. God bless the Vicarage! His heart warmed, and his eye--a little emotionalised, it might be, by the crisis he was passing through--moistened as he thought upon that smallpox-blistered door, and the happiness that had been behind it. And last of all ... there was Pam. What a soft and soothing cataplasm she was for all the soul's inflammations; for all the chafing irritation of spirit brought about by contact with a rough world. Her breath was balm, and her voice like a soft south wind blowing through the strings of a lute. All her freckles would cry aloud in welcome; her lips would disclose the pure, milky greeting of those white teeth; her hands--that he had, with amusement and exalted joy, watched struggling in their dear, feminine tirelessness with the contrary humors of Father Mostyn's keys--he knew what those hands would do when she heard of his return. They would clasp themselves and go beneath her chin. He had not noticed her for nothing. And then his mind went on to the shortening of the days; to the harvest gathered; to the crisp September; to the autumn, with its long, cosy evenings in the Vicar's room, and the music; to the winter; to Christmas; to the meetings; to the happiness; to the sea....

And by Christmas ... perhaps ... he would be married.

Married!

Married and far away. All these days would be but a remembrance. Father Mostyn and Pamela something less, and something infinitely more, than the figments of a dream. He would be building up a new life for himself; a new habitation for his soul to live in, out of new interests, out of new ambitions (if he had any), out of new environments.

Last of all, out of the mass of arguments and sub-arguments, questions and cross-questions, considerations and counter-considerations, in one of those sudden lucid heavenly flashes of righteousness with which the soul's lightning has power to pierce, at irregular and unexpected intervals, the cloud of doubt, he received the inspiration of resolve. Departure, the Spawer decided, was the only thing to save him. The necessity was cruel, no doubt--to the Ullbrig girl, perhaps, as well as himself--but in the momentary lucidity of soul he had caught the glimpse of this as his sole honorable path, and he elected now to pursue it. To make the requisite retractions and yet stay on was out of the question. He could not bring himself to exercise those despicable economies of affection--palpable retrenchments even--in his friendship with the girl, lacking which, to remain in Ullbrig was not to stand still but to advance. No amount of mere passive rectitude could check the evolution of facts and circumstances. The world did not stand still because one chastened spirit resolved to hold back from the general march of iniquity. There was nothing for it. He would go.

Then imagination, intoxicated with the virtuous bitter draught he had drained, took wild flight into the future. He was going, truly, but not for long. Pam and this wife of his that was to be should become as sisters. He pictured Pam's coming to visit them. Long, glorious visits they should be. And he and Beatrice should return to Cliff Wrangham. They would make Cliff Wrangham their summer residence, their winter residence, their life-long residence. Exaltation carried him to the pitch of bigamy even. In his wild desire to squeeze the last drop of happiness from these deadly sweet berries of fancy he was deaf to the voice of reason. He scarcely perceived whether it was Pam or the absent one that figured, in this glorified vision, as his wedded wife. At times, for all the power he possessed to discriminate, it might have been both. Or perhaps, with fine prophetic oversight of worldly institutions, he visioned a sublime state of platonic bliss in which was neither marrying nor giving in marriage. For extreme righteousness knows nothing of reason, nor does it argue. Arguments are but the beatings of its wings to gain impetus for flight, but the flight, once attained, transcends all logic. The sublime picture of married felicity that the Spawer created would have been the scandal of any decent, respectably constituted community. Had there been a dozen Pams, indeed, he would have included them all in this spiritual harem, and yet--repugnant as this indiscriminate scheme of domestic association might appear to the many--there was no taint of earthly impurity in his conception of it.

Fortified with this blest vision of a paradise as reward for the pains of present righteousness, he swallowed a hasty and a tasteless meal, and set off without further thought or delay--lest the strength of resolve might in any way leak from him before his purpose was accomplished--down the Ullbrig road. For he knew that his composure was bearing a tremendous burden on its back, and he feared, if he retarded too long, it might break down, when ultimately he met the girl, into some stammering, faulty, broken-backed, weak-kneed, incomplete accomplishment of his mission. If possible, he wanted to drop across her as though by pure accident. He did n't want her to detect any traces of labored premeditation in what he had to tell. He held the manner of the news-breaking roughly formulated in his mind, but he was anxious lest she might discern, through any flaw in the outer agreement of his smiles (just sufficiently tinged with regret, he told himself, to be in keeping with the subject of departure, but no more), the horrible machinery, driven by a thousand heart-power, clanking away inside him, and manufacturing this leave-taking to pattern, like rolled steel.

He was so little sure of his capacity to execute his own purpose that, through mere distrust of doing what he wanted to do, he was almost ready to give the project up and declare himself beaten before the battle. And all the while he walked onward he began to accumulate doubts respecting the undertaking of such a delicate operation beneath the searching light of day. He had one revelation of the girl's great eyes fixed solemnly upon his lips, and watching him as he wallowed in his embarrassment, and his soul flinched. For a moment he had desperate thoughts of return. Then he sat, under the white flag of truce, on a rail. Then he moved slowly onward again, with fixed eyes on Ullbrig, praying he might miss the girl. And with this prayer almost moving his lips, at Hesketh's corner he met her.

*CHAPTER XVI*

She wore a great hat of coarse Zulu straw, trimmed with white muslin and scarlet poppies, and a pale cream muslin dress, beneath whose hem her neat shoes and trim, black ankles showed themselves so demurely, like sleek twin witches of seductive enchantment. In her left hand she carried a snowy-topped basket emblematic of Faith, Hope and Charity--particularly this last--while the thumb of her cotton-gloved right hand was tucked, at the time of their recognition, into a green crocodile leather belt. She was just passing the corner, indeed, as she caught sight of the Spawer, and had to fall back on her heel to verify the impression; then she stood waiting for him, swinging the basket in front of her skirt with both hands, and showing the glad smile for a welcome and unexpected meeting. All the gloomy necessities of the encounter were packed up and stowed away at the back of the Spawer's being with the first slight shock of realisation. Almost spontaneously he discarded his reflections as though they had been impersonal and bearing no reference to the girl before him, and advanced upon her with the sunny face that seemed never to have known the clouds of disquietude.

"How funny," said Pam simply, as he came near. "... I was just thinking about you."

"I can see you were," he laughed.

"Can you?" asked Pam, smiling, but a shade incredulous.

"By your ears," he told her.

Pam put her fingers to them.

"It is the sun," she said, nipping a little crimson lobe between cool white-cottoned fingers. "Yours burn too. Were you thinking about me?"

"Perhaps."

"Were you? What were you thinking?"

"Tell me first what you were thinking about me?"

"I was thinking whether I should see you if I looked up the Cliff Wrangham road. But I never thought I should. And you?"

"I was thinking the same thing."

"Were you really? Did you want to see me ... about anything?"

It was the Spawer's opportunity to say what he had come to say, but like a faint-hearted jumper, feeling he had not bite enough for his purpose, he burked the hurdle.

"I don't know that I wanted to see you ... about anything," he answered, covering up his momentary hesitation with a smile, "... but I was perfectly agreeable to see you about nothing at all."

"Perhaps you 're coming to the post?" Pam hazarded.

"Nothing so reputable," said he. "Fact is, I 'm afraid I 've broken loose to-day. I 'm on the laze."

"You lazy!" laughed Pam, in incredulous amazement.

"Oh, horribly lazy, dear girl," he said. "If you don't know that you don't know me. It comes on at periods. I can't yet decide whether my hard work is sheer activity of a guilty conscience, or my laziness is the collapse of a conscience too highly taxed, but the one follows the other as night follows day. I 've not done a stroke of work since getting up. This morning I washed myself and bathed--you 'll say that's a good work done. This afternoon I determined to stroll inland and see if there was anybody disposed to take pity on my sad idleness. What a pretty basket!"

Pam held it up for his inspection.

"May I lift the cover?"

Pam nodded and laughed, showing all her white, small teeth in assent.

"Bottles," said he, taking a peep under the snowy serviette. "We 're well met. Which way are you going?"

"I 'm going to Shippus," said Pam, with a little wistful accent on the "I 'm," expressive of solitude.

"The very thing," said the Spawer. "And we won't touch them till we get there. Not a drop. Will you take me with you?"

"Will you go with me?" said Pam, a light of desire suddenly dawning in her eyes at his half-bantering suggestion.

"If you 'll have me."

"I 'll have you. But perhaps you would n't care ... it's a sick call."

"I don't care what it is," said the Spawer, "so long as it 's nothing catching. Tell me it 's not smallpox and I 'm with you."

"Oh, it is n't smallpox," Pam reassured him. "It 's only poor old Mr. Smethurst."

"Come," said the Spawer, relieved, "that does n't sound so alarming. I 'll risk it. And are the bottles his or ours?"

"His," said Pam, as the Spawer disengaged her of them, and they commenced to walk forward together. "Poor old gentleman. There 's a lemon jelly and a bottle of port and a bottle of whiskey. Those are from Father Mostyn--the very same that he drinks himself." Her eyes kindled luminously at the mention. "Is n't it good of him? Nobody knows but me what lots of things he gives away ... and what lots of things he does for people. He 'd do anything for anybody. They don't understand him in Ullbrig a bit. I did n't always, but I do now. They talk about his house, and say it wants painting. And of course it does. And they say he 's a Roman Catholic, and gets paid by the Pope for every conversion he makes; but that 's not true. He 's nothing at all to do with the Pope. And then they laugh at him because he goes down on his knees in church, but as he said one day to Mr. Stevens (Sheppardman): 'You touch your hat to me because I 'm his reverence the vicar, but you 're too proud to bow to the Lord Jesus.' And it 's not a matter of what he does in church. They ought n't to go by that--and they can't truthfully, because they 're never there to see. It's what he does in Ullbrig. If anybody 's ill, it 's always him they send for, and he always goes, whether it 's by night or day. When they 're well he talks about their hypocrisy and their sinfulness, and about their pride--you 've heard him, have n't you? But when they 're ill ... oh, you would n't know him. He 's as gentle as a woman. He looks at their medicine, and feels their pulse, and smooths their pillow; and oh, he talks so beautifully. When little Annie Summers died of diphtheria he sat up all the night after the operation, keeping her throat clear with a feather (that was very dangerous, of course, and he might have died of it), and when she was dead her father told him: 'I 've never given you a good word all my days, Mr. Mostyn,' and Father Mostyn only shook his head and told him: 'Well, well, John, give it me now.' And when poor old James Marshall was dying they sent for Father Mostyn, of course, and James told him he was a bit fearsome he had n't done the right thing in spending so much of his time at chapel. And Father Mostyn said: 'Make your mind easy, James, there are no churches or chapels up there.' Old Mr. Smethurst used to go to chapel, too, when he was well enough to go anywhere, but as Father Mostyn says, we can't help that. The wine will do him as much good as if he had been to church. And it was a long time ago. He 'll never go there any more."

"Is he so ill as that?" asked the Spawer.

"He 's dying," said Pam.

The little tremor of her lip, and the sudden moistness about her eyes--though he had witnessed these wonderful manifestations of her tender nature before on many an occasion--went to the Spawer's heart in the present instance like an arrow. Pam's tears were in everybody's service. Not idle tears, but tears that seemed the sacred seal of noble self-sacrifice and devotion.

And to think he was so soon going to remove himself from the soft-dropping springs of their sympathy.

"What a ministering angel you are," he said, looking at her lightly enough, and yet--though Pam could not know that--with a kind of tightness about the throat.

"I 'm afraid I 'm not an angel," the girl regretted. "Not a bit of one. I wish I were."

"On the contrary," he said, "wish nothing of the kind."

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because Ullbrig would miss you so. Angels' visits are few and far between, and when they come they don't bring bottles. Be what you are," he told her. "A lay angel."

"Don't you believe in real angels?" Pam asked him ingenuously. "Dr. Anderson does n't."

The Spawer smiled.

"Kindness is the greatest angel in the world," he said, and looked at her. "I believe in kindness."

"So do I," said Pam.

"And do you never, never get tired of doing kind actions?" he asked her curiously. "... Surely you must."

Pam gave him a quick look and dropped her lip, as though a little lead-weight of admission were upon it.

"Sometimes I do," she admitted, and turned her face away from him as though the thought of her own offend-ing troubled her. "But somehow ... kind acts always seem to pay for themselves, don't you think?"

"Do they?" he asked hazily.

"Why, yes," Pam said, after a moment, just a little shaken in her confidence by his question. "The more you don't want to do a thing, the more you 're glad when you 've gone and done it--a kind thing I mean."

The more you did n't want to do a thing the more you were glad when you 'd gone and done it. How did that apply to him?

"... Father Mostyn says you must beware of doing kindnesses for the mere gratification of being thanked. He says that's a deadly sin--one of the prides of charity. There are a lot more, but that 's the worst. What do you think?"

"What do I think? Gracious!" laughed the Spawer, "I dare n't contradict his Reverence. I think so too."

"But you! You 're quite different from me," the girl objected. "I could n't be kind at all if it were n't for Father Mostyn. All my kindnesses have been taught me by him." Such is the power of loyalty and loving adherence, that transfers its own virtues to the object of affection. "But you. I don't think you can help being kind. Some people can't. You seem to do things from the heart somehow, as though they came naturally to you; but me, I do all mine from the head, because I 've been taught what things are kind and what things are cruel. And often I make mistakes too." She was thinking of the schoolmaster. "But you never do."

Did n't he? What were all his trumpery smiles and petty kindnesses, his smooth words and minor generosities, but little errors of excess in a grand sum of cruelty, that had brought the total to an amount he dared scarcely contemplate, and were compelling him this day to cancel these labyrinthine workings of arithmetic by a wholesale application of the sponge?

"That," said he, looking leniently upon her, "is because your kindness, little woman, won't let you find flaws in mine. But there are flaws in it--great flaws."

"Where?" asked Pam, with the earnestness of a child.

"All over," said the Spawer.

"You have always been kind to me," said Pam.

"Don't let 's talk of that," he responded cheerfully, affecting--double-dyed hypocrite that he knew himself to be--a sublime disregard of such kindnesses as had been his, which but served to illuminate his conduct in the girl's eyes with letters of celestial gold paint.

"May n't I talk to you about it ... ever, please?" the girl asked him.

"Oh, if it 's a question of pleases," he said, with laughing concession, "I would n't deny you for worlds. Talk away, dear child."

Did he realise how much store the girl set by these diminutive titles of affectionate address? Did he know that each time he called her "Dear child" and "Dear girl" and "Little woman" (mere friendly substitutes for the Pam he never used) her heart leaped up in responsive gladness? Did he know that each of these designations, so lightly uttered by him, was a nail driven into the door against his departure, and that door the girl's own heart? Surely and truly he never knew it, or even our hero, Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, for all his blackguardism, would have shrunk from the usage of them.

"Now I don't know what to say," Pam said.

"Why ever not?"

"Because you told me to talk away."

"How like a girl! Wants to do a thing until she 's bidden, and then ... be hanged if she will. You contrary little feminine."

All the same, as soon as he adjured her not to mind, but to say no more about it, she found plenty to say in a sudden gush respecting his past kindness to her. He had been so good to her. She had told Father Mostyn to be sure and tell him how grateful she felt to him for all his goodness.... Had he? But she had been dying to tell him herself too. And somehow, whenever she had begun, he had always turned her off so kindly that she had never done any more than tell him that she wanted to tell him, and never told him; but to-day, when he had spoken about _her_ kindness, she felt she must tell him about his. There had been no reason why he should have been kind to her. He had done it all so beautifully ... that there seemed nothing in it, and at times she 'd almost believed that there was nothing in it either, and that it was just happening so, and no more. But when she 'd come to look into it she saw exactly how much there was, and how it could have happened otherwise--oh, quite otherwise--but for his great kindness in preventing it. Why had he been so good to her? It was n't--as he 'd tried to make out--that there was anything to gain, because she 'd nothing in the world to give him except her thanks--and until to-day he 'd never even accepted those from her. Father Mostyn had told her, as he 'd told her himself, that he did n't give lessons to anybody else ... and that she was his only pupil. She 'd tried not to feel proud about that, because it was no merit of her own, but simply his own goodness; but she could n't help it. Father Mostyn said you might feel proud if your pride were pride of loyalty--as pride in the Church, or in the goodness of another--and in that way she 'd felt proud. But it was difficult dealing with prides; they got the better of you somehow. He 'd given her music because he said he knew where to send for it, and could get it down quicker--being known to the people--but that was just so that she need n't have to pay for it. And he 'd made her a present of Erckmann-Chatrian's "L'ami Fritz" and "Le Blocus," and a beautiful French Dictionary....

"Well," he asked her, "... where 's the goodness in that?"

"It was all of it goodness."

"Nothing of the sort, dear girl. It 's all pure selfish pride."

Oh, no, no, no! Pam could n't believe that.

Oh, but she must believe it. He 'd given her lessons solely for his own pleasure--not hers--because teaching her had interested him, and it was a sort of recreation. And he 'd taught her French for the same reason, and for the pride of being looked up to as a great French authority. And he 'd given her books and music so that she might say what a kind, generous fellow he was,--oh, she must n't make any mistake about the matter; it was precious little goodness she 'd have found about him. Oh, he was a bad one at heart!

So, arguing agreeably on the subject of goodness specific and general, they walked along the high-road lane that leads to Shippus.

Thus they came at last upon a group of two or three detached cottages along the roadside, white-washed and blinding, with thatched roofs and tarred palings, and a profusion of giant nasturtiums clambering over the doors and licking at the window-sills with a great yellow-scarlet blaze, as though the porches were on fire. Here Pam slowed up, and held out her hand for the basket.

"Shall you be long?" the Spawer asked, giving it to her.

"Perhaps you won't care to wait?" she suggested wistfully, though offering him his liberation.

"Trot along," said he, smiling back refusal of the proffered freedom. "I 'll hang about outside for you. Only promise me you won't slip away by the back."

He smiled and raised his hat to her with that delightful blending of familiarity and homage which had won the girl's heart from the first. There were points about his kindness which she could not touch upon, even to him, and this was one. Other men might have made her position unbearable, but he never. The raising of the hat itself meant nothing, for she knew it was an instinctive recognition of her sex which accomplished itself, in his case, even when the sex was adequately disguised beneath harden aprons and masculine caps; but the action as he performed it had none of the odious insinuating gallantry to which the Saturday Hunmouth trippers had accustomed but never reconciled her. With no man had she ever been so intimate as with this one; and yet no man had ever so helped her to preserve her own modest self-respect.

Ah, Pam, Pam, Pam! Do you see that queer little hunched-up shadow, carrying a shapeless lump of a basket, that keeps close by your side as you cross the road and lay your finger upon the latch of the tarred wooden wicket? It is the little old lady, as plain as plain can be. She makes no noise; her footsteps merge in yours; but day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, she never leaves you. The time approaches when she shall rise up in her hideous deformity and declare you a prisoner in her dwelling. And you shall gaze upon the features of an altered world through wet windows of running tears.

*CHAPTER XVII*

Outside the Spawer strolled gently to and fro along the white, staring roadway, stopping always a little short of the cottages lest his constant recurrence in face of the window might seem like an embargo upon Pam's moments. To a casual observer he looked, in his light flannels and straw hat--tilted a little over his nose for facing the sun--the typical figure of a summer lounger, with no endeavor beyond indolence, and no thought above keeping cool. But within, his brain was busily clanking and clamoring, like an overpressed newspaper office; editing, sub-editing, inserting, deleting, putting all his conduct into orderly columns and making ruthless "pi" of it. One item of intelligence alone remained stable amid the vast jumble of worthless, inconsequential paragraphs:

DEPARTURE OF THE SPAWER.

He was still pacing up and down the roadway, his eyes engrossed in some systematic method of placing his toes, engaged on the task of convincing himself that he had let no real possible opportunity slip during their walk of acquainting the girl with the inevitable, when the atmosphere of a sudden lighted up, as it were, and he saw the red poppies over the gateway, stooping somewhat at the latch.

"What! So soon?" he asked; and again, by the apparently spontaneous mental process, he threw off his heavy mantle of musing, and smiled as though he had nothing to think of but happiness. "Come! You 've let me off handsome."

Then he saw that Pam's lips looked a little troubled, and her eyes sought his face with trepidation.

"It 's not that..." she said, watching his gaze like a compass. "... I 'm not done yet. But they ... they saw you were with me ... and ... and won't you come in?"

"It 's awfully good of 'em, little woman," he said. "Just tell 'em so, won't you? But really, I don't mind a bit. In fact, I 'd rather be out here in the sun."

"I thought you would n't," Pam said, more to herself, as though his reply constituted a refusal of something not uttered, but in her mind only. And still she stood; and while she looked at the Spawer her eyes filled with that sublime wistfulness of theirs that finds no translation in words. "That 's not all," she said, after a pause. "I have n't told you. They know ... who you are."

"Jove!" exclaimed the Spawer. "What a reputation I have in this part of the globe. If only it were universal."

"It's my fault..." Pam confessed.

"There 's no fault about it, dear girl," he made haste to reassure her. "On the contrary, it 's a jolly kind thought."

"But I 'm afraid ... I told them it was you when they asked if it was. And they know how beautifully you play." Her eyes were absolutely sealed down upon his now, so that not a flicker of their expression could escape her. "... And ... and poor old Mr. Smethurst said there were n't many that could play like you. And I told him, indeed there were n't. And I was telling him how beautifully you did play ... and all of a sudden he said he should just like to hear you play 'Sound the loud timbrel' ... before he died. Did I think you would? And Mrs. Smethurst was frightened, and said: 'Oh, John,' you must n't ask such things of a gentleman like that. He does n't play to such as us.' And he said, oh, so sadly: 'Nay, nay, I suppose I must n't. But I feel he 'd do it if only we dared ask him.' And I did n't know what to say ... because, of course, I know it's a dreadful thing to ask you. But I made a pretence of coming out to see whether you would come in and sit down."

The Spawer wrinkled his brows.

"It 's not so much the asking," he said, with a perplexed smile, "but it 's the doing, little woman. Have they a piano forte?"

"No, no." Pam sank deeper into her trouble. "It 's only a harmonium ... a very old one. I know it 's a dreadful thing to ask you to sit down to a harmonium--and a hymn tune too. I 'd never, never have asked you to do such a thing for myself--but for somebody else that 's never going to get better again. Sometimes it does sick people you don't know how much good to have their fancies gratified. I offered to try and play it myself, but he told me: 'You can play it and welcome ... but it won't be him.'"

"Little woman," said the Spawer, "no one knows better than you what an act of martyrdom it is for a pianist to sit down to a harmonium and humble himself to a hymn tune. But because it 's you that have asked me, for your sake and through sheer pride--to show you how good I am--I 'll do it. It sounds good, but it's sheer, downright pride, remember. Only pride could get through with it. Now; lead on, kindly light."

He took hold of her indulgently by the arm, and for a few paces walked so with her. To the girl that touch was the crowning patent of his nobility and goodness; to him it was so magnetically charged with the dangerous communion of red, warm blood that he let go of it by slow, imperceptible degrees, but with no less the feeling that he was discarding a deadly temptation. The warmth of a woman's body is an enervating atmosphere to the moral fibres of a man when that body is the object of his renunciation, and his fibres are slackened to start with. And the proud illumination about the girl's eyes as she went forward at his instigation was like the high, bright blaze of a lighthouse for holding him prisoner to its beacon against all the futile beating of his wings.

Through the tarred gate and under the trailing flames of nasturtium Pam led him into the cottage of the dying man. It was a kitchen living-room they stepped into. All about the threshold and nasturtium porch was enveloped in its own stifling atmosphere of hot leaves and baking--as distinct from the corn-scented suffocation of the outer air. The kitchen itself seemed congested with a close, oveny odor; the accumulated smell of many meals and many bakings, never expelled, and the peaty reek of a place where the fire burns day in, day out.

In a high-backed wooden chair by the warm side of the oven sat the dying man, not so nearly dead as the Spawer had pictured him, perhaps, but obviously stricken. He sat, an old withered figure, with the strange inertness of body characteristic of the aged and the very sick, alive seemingly no lower than his head, which moved slowly in the socket of a grey plaid muffler, wrapped about his neck and tucked away beneath the lapels of his dingy green-black coat. There was a red cotton cushion propped under his shoulders. His legs, motionless as the padded legs of a guy, and as convincing, looked strangely swollen and shapeless by contrast with his white and wasted face. At their extremity a pair of lifeless, thick ankles were squeezed into clumsy country slippers, whose toes never once, during the course of the Spawer's visit, stirred away from the red spot on the hearthrug where he had at first observed them. The invalid's breathing was the labored wheezy usage of lungs that bespoke asthma and bronchitis, and the hands that clasped the arms of the wooden chair might have been carved in horn. A couple of crooked sticks placed in the projecting angle of the range showed his extremity in the matter of locomotion. To the Spawer, whose experience with the dark obverse of life's bright medallion was restricted, and whose acquaintance with death and death's methods was more by hearsay, as of some notorious usurer, the picture was not a pleasant one. He had rather been left out in the pure sunshine with his own tormenting thoughts than be brought face to face with the actual draught that all men mortal must drain. And yet, he told himself, this was the sort of thing that Pam was almost daily sacrificing some portion of her young life to; giving generously a share of her own freshness and healthfulness and vitality to keep burning these wan and flickering flames. Wonder of wonders, the magic chalice of a woman's heart, that can pour forth its crystalline stream of love and comfort and consolation, and yet not run dry.

An elderly woman, in a print dress, whose hands were nervously fidgeting with the jet brooch at her throat, and who seemed employed in watching the door with a smile not devoid of anxiety, curtseyed with painful respectfulness at the Spawer's entrance, and dusting the surface of a wooden chair, begged him to be seated. If he had lacked Pam's assurance that his presence was coveted he might have almost reproached himself for entering at some inopportune moment. A great air of formality seemed to enter with his advent, and stiffen all about them--he felt it himself--as though they were on the brink of some important ceremony with whose procedure they were unacquainted, like Protestants at High Mass. He took the chair, however, with the utmost friendliness and thankfulness he could assume, and tried to sit down upon it with a pleasant air of relief, as though it were a welcome accessory to his comfort, and he were grateful. He was very anxious, for his pride's sake, to do Pam credit.

"Ah!" he said, seeming to welcome the discovery of the fire as something, in these chill times, to be glad for, and addressing himself to the sick man, made pleasant allusion to it. "You keep a bit of a blaze, I see," he said.

"Ye 'll 'a to speak up tiv 'im a bit, sir," the woman instructed him deferentially. "'E weean't a 'eard ye. 'E 's gettin' that deaf it 's past mekkin' 'im understand at times."

The man's head turned slowly in its grey woolen socket, as though he had caught the fact of his being in question, but was out of the reach of the inquiry, and seeking by the petition of his eye to be informed.

"'E 's speakin' about fire, gentleman is," the woman told him.

"What fire?" the sick man asked, in a frail, piping voice--a voice that a three-days' chicken might almost have challenged.

He asked the question mechanically, with his eyes on the Spawer, but his interest lay somewhere beyond the borderland of earthly things, as though his mind, through much solitude of wandering, had strayed in advance of his body towards the bourne of them both, and was recalled to the flesh with increasing difficulty.

"Kitchen fire," his wife explained to him. "Fire i' grate yonder."

The man followed the line of her knotted, bony forefinger, and let his eyes fall on the wasted red cinders, so symbolical of his own condition.

"Ay," he said, after a moment, when it had almost come to seem that the connection between finger and fireplace was quite lost. "Fire 's a bit o' company to me. We 've been good friends a goodish piece noo, but ah s'll not need 'er so much longer, ah 'm thinkin'."

"Ye div n't know what ye 'll need," his wife admonished him, with the sharpness of personal anxiety. But to the Spawer she added, catching at her brooch: "Cough troubles 'im a deal o' nights noo. Doctor says 'e misdoots 'e 'll see another winter thruff. 'E 'd seummut to do to get thruff last."

The sick man knew, with the dumb instinct of a dog, that his case was being discussed. He fastened his eyes on the Spawer's face to see whether it would give him any clue to the words that were being uttered. His wife's, by experience, he knew would tell him nothing; but a stranger's might.

"Ah 'm about at far end," he piped, in his placid, piteous harmonic of a voice, that issued between his lips with a sound like the blowing of a cornstraw. "Ah 've been a sad, naughty slaverbags i' my time, bud ah 'm done noo. It's 'arvest time wi' me, an' ah 'm bein' gathered in, ah think. Doctor 's patched my bellows up a deal o' times, bud they weean't stan' mendin' no more."

"Why weean't they? Ye 've breathed a deal free-er last few days," his wife tried to instil into him. "It 's 'is 'eart as well," she told the Spawer. "Doctor says it 's about worn out. Ay, poor man, poor man! What a thing it is to sit an' watch 'im gan, ah-sure. An' 'im so active as 'e was. Bud cryin' weean't alter it, for ah 've tried, an' it 's no use. It 's Lord's will, an' we mun just be thankful 'at 'E 's spared 'im as long as 'E 'as, wi' me to look after 'im an' see 'e gans off comfortable. There 's monny 'at is n't blessed so well as that."

The sick man fastened his eye on the Spawer again.

"Ye come fro' Dixon's?" he said inquiringly; and when the Spawer gave him an illuminative "Yes"--"Ay," he said, through his thin lips. "It 's long enough sin' ah seed 'im. Mebbe ye 'll do me the kindness to gie 'im mah respecks when ye get back. Monny 's the time 'im an' me 's met i' Oommuth market an' driven wum [home] i' Tankard's 'bus together.... Ah 've been nowt bud trouble tiv 'er sin' day she wor fond enough to tek me, an' she would n't 'a tekken me then, bud ah begged ower 'ard. An' ah 'm nowt bud trouble tiv 'er noo."

"Ay, an' ah 'd tek ye agen lad," the thin, worn woman told him, with an assurance that was almost fierce. "Ne'er mind whether ye 're a bad un or no. Ah 've nivver rued day ah tekt ye--though ye 'd gie'n me twice trouble ye did. Ah mud 'ave looked far to fin' a better, an' then not fun' [found] 'im. Let ye be as drunk as ye would, ye nivver gied me a bad wod nor lifted 'and agen me."

"Nay, ah nivver lifted 'and agen ye," the man assented. "Ah 'ad n't need. Bud that 's little to my credit. Ah trailed ye thruff tribulation. What time ye was n't workin' to mek good what ah 'd wasted ye was weepin' an' waitin' o' me. There 's scarcelins a Saturday neet, at one time, ye set oot wi' a dry eye."

"Ay, bud ye nivver stayed away ower Sunday," his wife claimed, with pride. "Ye was allus back an' to spare when Oolbrig bells got set o' ringin'. An' it's not ivvery man's wife about this district 'at can say same of 'er 'usband."

The sick man listened to her, and a pale, wintry smile flickered across his face and over his frost-nipped lips. Years ago, perhaps, it had been a smile as full of sunlight as the Spawer's own, and dear to the woman's heart. Perhaps her soul had pined for that very smile, and drunk of its remembrance, in the dark hours that clouded her life from time to time. The sick man turned his eyes upon the Spawer, while yet the feeble ray illuminated them.

"Ah did n't chose so badlins," he said, with a tinge of the dry humor that sparkles mirthfully in the men of these parts like the crackling of blazing twigs under a pot. "Nay, ah got best o' bargain when she fastened 'ersen. Chosin' a wife 's same as chosin' a mare or owt else, an' there 's a deal o' ways o' chosin' wrong. Don't tek notice o' way a lass gans on tiv you, if ye want to pick a good un--for they 're all t' same when they 're carryin' on wi' a man. Good uns an' bad uns acts alike then. Div n't tek a woman 'll 'at fin's ower much fault wi' 'er neighbors--syke a woman 'll fin' plenty wi' you when she 's gotten ye fast. Ye want to 'ave a sharp eye when ye gan coortin'. There 's some on 'em 'at gans coortin' by neet, 'at scarcelins knows look o' their lass by day. That 's no way. Don't tek on wi' a lass because she carries a 'ymn book. Onny lass can carry a 'ymn book. Tek one 'at 's gotten all 'er 'ymns i' 'er 'eart. Don't trust yersen tiv a lass 'at wastes all 'er time i' runnin' after ye. Think on it 's 'er feythur's time she 's wastin', 'appen, an' when she 's gotten ye she 'll waste yours. Ay, an' try an' pick a wench 'at dizz n't mind doin' what she can to mek it a bit brighter for them 'at 's gannin' quick down shady side o' life. 'Appen she 'll do t' same when it comes tiv your ton [turn]."

All these things the Spawer promised to bear in mind when the time came, with the despicable hypocrisy that assumed, as a cloak, the smiling improbability of any such occurrence. Cad that he felt himself, he dared not look at Pam, seated apart on a chair by the door leading into a small scullery beyond. Like Peter he kept denying--by inference, at least--the facts of a case that would so unpleasantly involve him. Like Peter, each successive denial smote him to the heart; he wept in spirit over his own spirit's weakness. And yet, as he asked himself very naturally, even as he held his smile towards the old man, and studiously away from the girl that fulfilled (either in actuality or in the guilty similarity set up by his soul) every condition of the old fellow's warning--was this the proper moment to declare to her what he had to declare to her? Could he for the first time acquaint her with facts for which she was all unprepared before strangers? No, no, no. Later on, he swore it, he would fulfil his afternoon's mission. He was merely a musician, he told himself, using destiny as his fiddle, tuning the strings of circumstance to the tune needed of him. So, catching sight of the little despicable harmonium for the hundredth time, with the suddenly sparkling eye for a revelation, "What," said he, in accents of surprised pleasure that even deceived Pam--(though he dared not have thought it)--"a harmonium?"

The old woman whipped off its meagre tippet of oilcloth in a twinkling, and displayed its poor double octave of discolored celluloid with a toothless smile of proud possession.

"Mester bought it," she said. "He was allus fond of a bit o' music."

How was she to know, poor soul, the strickening effect that fatal use of the diminutive had on the sensitive fibres of the Spawer's nature? Not from his face, surely, for he smiled pure sunlight.

They dusted the keys for him, and a chair, and put up the fragile desk, that subsided like a schooner before the blast, with its masts bending, and the Spawer sat down and did his best.

Heavens, what a best!

The very tone of the instrument that cried out under his touch shook his soul and almost frightened his fingers from the keys. So raucous it was; so noisily sanctimonious; so redolent of blind musicians; of street-corner meetings; so unblushingly bald; so callous; so unsensitive; so ostentatious; so utterly awful. Every nerve, fibre, and tissue of musical organization was offended; it was a crying offence against every instinct of musical art. And all the while, as though the soul itself were not being sufficiently punished by humiliation, the body was being subjected to the physical indignity of working its legs like a journeyman scissors-grinder.

Ye gods! the tragic absurdity of it all. To musical natures less cultured, to senses less susceptible than the Spawer's, there would have been the rising of throats and the wetness of tears during this scene, for, truth to tell, it lacked none of the elements of moving pathos and tragedy. The dying man; the care-worn woman; the girl with the compassionate lips; the musician bending over his task of devotion; the hymn tune evolved into harmony by his shaping fingers from the low humming of the girl's lips:

"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea; Jehovah hath triumphed, His people are free..."

the half-drawn blind--so soon to be drawn down to its full; the sun beating on the window and on the red-tiled floor....

Not one witness in a thousand, drawn independently to consider the scene, would have pierced to the heart of the pathos, and grasped through the tearful confusion of their sympathies, that perhaps the most beautiful focus-point of emotion was in the seated figure of the musician, castigating his musical soul with biting thongs for the sake of one girl and a dying man, and showing no sign.

And what recompense of moral gratification did he receive in return for his act of artistic abnegation? Little enough, it must be confessed, that the Spawer could discover. The old man looked older, he thought; the old woman's prefatory smile of appreciative pride had been quenched by the music, and her attitude when he turned round upon her was the incomprehending silence of respect. All her face, so to speak, had fallen to pieces like an over-shortened pie, with no concentration of interest to hold up the crust of its expression. Perhaps the very harmonies with which the Spawer had clad the naked melody of a hymn tune had so baffled their decaying, primitive hearing that they had failed to recognise it in its new garb. He had done better, possibly, to play the melody out for them with one finger. Pam's face alone compensated him. She, he knew--and was glad to know--was too much awakened to the scope and magnitude of music to have derived anything approaching personal pleasure from a crude performance such as this; but she had realised what nausea it must have been to him, and in the light of a sacrifice alone she had rejoiced in his achievement.

Well, however, the achievement was over, and they were ready to go any time now. The old woman replaced the oilcloth over the harmonium with a look of relief (or so the Spawer thought, but he thought wrong), and Pam was just opening her lips to suggest departure when the old man piped out in his faltering treble:

"Ay, bud ye 'll gie me a chapter before ye gan, lass, weean't ye?"

Pam turned a troubled eye part-way towards the Spawer, as though it were accompanying a thought of hers on its own account; but she stopped it before it reached him, and dropped submissive hands.

"Would you like me to?" she asked gently.

"Ay; ah s'd tek it kindly if ye would."

"You don't mind?" she asked the Spawer softly; and with his assent, readily given, "I will," she said.

"Gie 'er the Book, lass," he ordered his wife; and the careworn woman lifted it from beneath a pair of folded spectacles, and delivered it reverently into the girl's receiving fingers.

"What shall I read you?" Pam asked, setting the book on her knees, and turning over the pages, now backwards, now forwards.

"Ah 'll 'ave that bit o' John," he told her, "about mansions an' such-like, if ye 've no objections."

"Is that the fourteenth chapter?" Pam suggested inquiringly. "Did n't we have it last time?"

"Ay, an' we mud as lief 'ave it this," he decided placidly. "It 'll be none the wuss of a time or two. Book 's not same as other things. There 's allus seummut fresh in it for them 'at gans tiv it wi' a right 'eart. Ah s'd 'a done better if ah 'd ganned tiv it when ah 'ad use o' legs Lord gid me. It 's ower late to larn me to walk straight i' this wuld noo, but 'appen ah s'll be about ready to scrammle along to next, when time comes."

"The fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John," Pam announced, as signifying that she had found the place, and smoothing down the page with her soft finger, lifted her voice and read:

"Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."

When Pam said: "If it were not so ... I would have told you," one felt it must be so indeed. Such lips could never lie. And as the girl's clear voice rose and filled that little kitchen--so compassionate, so truthful, so natural--the full sublimity of the picture of a sudden swelled up in the Spawer's soul and mounted to his throat. The ingredient elements of the scene were unchanged, but now how exalted. He saw, in a flash, as though his spiritual eyes had been opened, the true pathos of the picture: the dying man, seated so motionless in his chair, with his faded blue eyes gazing into Heaven through the blind; the worn woman, the better portion of whose years and loving energy the man was taking to the grave with him; the sweet, purifying sunlight bathing the world outside; the girl with the lips of celestial compassion, drawing old truths from the battered and thumb-marked Bible, distilling them anew in pure liquid sound, and dropping them so coolingly into the overheated kitchen of death. All these he saw--acutely with his inward vision, dimly with his material--and wondered, as he saw it, that the girl could proceed so courageously and so unfalteringly on her consolatory path. He himself would have fared along it badly, and knew it. But it was not the last time he was to marvel at the girl's self-possession when circumstances demanded, and perhaps this second time he would remember it even better.

"Ye 'll tek liberty to call agen, mebbe," the old man invited him as they stood finally for departure, "... if ah 'm not mekkin' ower free to ask ye; but it 's a lonely road when a man draws to yend of 'is days. Busy folk can't reckon to be treubled wi' 'im--an' i' 'arvest an' all. Ah wor no better mysen when ah 'ad my faculties. Ye 'll be stayin' wi' Dixon a goodish while yet, mebbe?"

At the direct question the Spawer's resolution spun round and made as though to turn tail. There was just a slight pause--quite inappreciable to the others about him, but painfully magnified to himself--while he struggled whether to ignore the opportunity or seize it like a man, and sign irrevocably the bond of his departure.

"Perhaps..." he was quibbling with the reply even yet, while speaking, not knowing whether to evade or to grapple with his chance. Then he grappled suddenly, but always with that frank, pleasant smile of his that showed no inkling of an inward perplexity. "... On the other hand," he said, "... it 's possible I may be going any time now--any day even." He sensed rather than saw the quick turn of the girl's eyes upon him, and knew, too, in what kind of mild, protesting surprise she was looking at him. She could not credit that he should first communicate such an important piece of intelligence to strangers, without having prepared her by a single word, and was wondering sorrowfully whether it were not an excuse to evade any promise of visiting the old man again.

"It all depends," the Spawer explained, throwing his explanation over the truth of the matter like a pleasant nebula, "... on a letter. I 'm expecting to hear. One can't stay for ever, you know," he added amiably, "even where one 's happy."

"Nay, nay," the old man acquiesced mournfully. "When a man comes to my years 'e fin's that oot tiv 'is sorrer. Well, well; ah awpe [hope] when ye think fit to change ye 'll change for t' better, young gen'leman, an' ah thank ye for yer company an' yer kindness." He turned the faint flicker of his long-ago smile upon Pam, like the sunlight stealing over an autumn landscape.

"Pam 's not likely to change yet a bit," he said, with a sense of comfort in the thought, as though the girl were a true staff to rest on in time of trouble. Pam shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, Pam mun 't change yet a bit," he admonished her. "She mun stop an' see t' old man 's time oot, ah think. 'E weean't keep 'er so long noo, but 'e 's a selfish old chap; 'e dizz n't want to part wi' 'er no sooner nor need be. She 's been as good tiv 'im as if she 'd been 'is own bairn. Ay, an' better. There 's not monny bairns 'at 'ud 'a done as much--an' said as little. Nay, nay; they 'd 'a telt 'im 'e was a treublesome old feller long sin'. Good-by, lass; good-by--an' gie my respecks tiv 'is Rivrence when 'e comes back."

His eye kindled momentarily as the girl laid light fingers on the horny right hand and stooped and kissed him. But the light of this died out of them as soon as he had done speaking, and the pressure of her clasp relaxed. As they passed out of the kitchen his gaze followed them dimly from afar, seeming to inquire who were these figures departing, and whence came they and what their errand, and in what remote, unintelligible degree their presence concerned himself.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

For a short space the Spawer and Pam walked along in silence, but sharing the same thought, as though they made joint use of an umbrella. The stillness of a great Sunday had fallen over them; like communicants of the Blessed Sacrament of Charity, they walked away a little hushed, each treasuring the remembrance of the other's goodness; each trying to retain undissipated those elusive sky-colors of exaltation that at length must melt and fade away, however carefully cherished, into the dull grey of daily life.

And between here and the joining of the roads at Hesketh's corner the Spawer was pledged to sign the document of departure. In two odd miles of green-bordered laneway he was to waft all their charitable illusion on one side with the rude hand of resolve, like the intrusive fumes of rank tobacco, rather than the blessed clouds of incense, and make a clear path for his shuffling feet to walk in.

He stole a look down the side of his nose at the girl by his elbow. If her clear face had been a window, and he a contemptible urchin whose purpose was a stone secreted in the palm of his hostile hand, he could not have put it behind his back with greater shame or remorse when she looked up at him.

"Hello!" he said, drawing up in their equable stride with a fine pretence of awakening consciousness to the trend of their steps. "Where on earth are we hurrying off to so fast?"

The girl drew up too, and sought his face inquiringly.

"Home ... are n't we?" she suggested, with a gentle stirring of surprise at his need for the question.

"Are you so anxious to get rid of me?" he asked.

"I? Oh, no ... I was n't thinking about that."

"Let 's think about it now, then," he prompted agreeably. "Truth to tell, little woman, you 've made me feel such a very good little boy--so smug and pious--that I dread going back to the corrupt and naughty world yet a bit. I feel I only want just a little time for my wings to grow. So don't spoil an angel for a penn'orth of tar. Give me a chance to become a cherub, that 's a dear girl. What do you say to a turn as far as the cliff at Shippus? I 'm not sure that I shan't be able to fly by the time we get there. Don't stand in the way of my flying, please."

Pam stood swinging the empty basket against her skirts, with a hungry look towards Shippus and a lingering duty-pull towards Ullbrig. Inwardly, ah! if he 'd only known how she was dying to accept this invitation without demur.

"I don't know ... I should like," she admitted, and asked: "What time is it, please?"

"Ah, what a girl for strict time it is, to be sure," the Spawer made answer banteringly, pulling out his watch. "Always one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. But strict time 's not always music, piccola mia, don't forget that. And music 's like life, no good at all without a little 'tempo rubato.' Five o'clock, dear child--and there 's a green fly on your chin." He stooped forward, put his lips towards it, and puffed it lightly away. What a pretty chin it was, seen so near too, and how almost like kissing it it had seemed--though not quite. Ah, not quite. (What would she have said if he had, now?) "There," he exclaimed, as the green fly floated out into space, "... excuse my taking the liberty of blowing, but I was n't sure of my touch. I did n't want to defile your chin with a murder, by accident. Well, what do you say?"

"Five o'clock 's rather late," was what the girl said, but there was as little backbone in the suggestion as in the body of a sawdust doll. "I 'm afraid ... tea."

"The very thing," the Spawer decided. "Let 's have tea at Shippus together, and walk back like giants refreshed. Come; what do you say to that? I say beautiful! beautiful! What do you say?"

Apparently the girl said "Oh!" and having said that, seemed able to say no more.

"Very well, then," the Spawer declared, artfully taking the "Oh!" for assent. "Come along and let 's tell 'em to put the kettle on, and be sure to give us tea-leaves out of the canister."

He took possession of the basket again, that she released into his hands as token of submission to his will.

"You won't ... lose the cover cloth, though, will you?" she besought him, when he showed a tendency to swing it too freely.

"I 'll stuff it in my pocket," he promised her, suiting action to his words. "And then I shall be sure to have it safe with me at Cliff Wrangham when you want it."

Then slowly and happily they retraced their steps towards the sea.

Being a Tuesday, and harvest-time to boot--the sacred Sunday feeling of silence covered Shippus too beneath its beneficent mantle. Moreover, week-days are the only Sabbaths that this place ever knows. As soon as the church bells of Ullbrig announce to the landlady of the Royal Arms (which is four fifths of Shippus, as everybody knows) the hour of divine service, she throws open the dingy business door, and listens for the welcome rumble of the first brake load of travelers who have driven out the thirteen odd miles from Hunmouth to be supplied with the drink that would be denied them (by the devout act of a Protestant and religious Government) at their own door. There is nothing at all royal about the Royal Arms except the name. It is disclosed with the remaining few cottages of Shippus at a quick turn of the road--an irregular, dirty-washed building--presenting, apparently, nothing but back doors. Indeed, there is no front entrance at all, that I know of. And the Spawer approaches the Royal Arms and orders the Royal Arms to put the kettle on and lay the table for two, with ham and eggs and anything else they think likely to tempt an invalid. And the Royal Arms, which is the austere-faced lady who looked sternly at them on their arrival through the small-paned window of what might be the scullery, after suggesting that he should accompany her to the hen-run and pick his fancy, promised tea faithfully in twenty minutes. She could also promise it in fifteen, if he liked, but not faithfully.

On a backless bench, close by the cliff edge, Pam and the Spawer sat together in blessed community of spirit, and solaced their souls in the blue sea before them. The sun, sinking behind their backs, cast their two shadows far out on to the sands below, above the black silhouette of the cliff. Right out to sea, on the straight, blue line of the horizon, a ship stood up in snowy purity, like an iceberg. Over one corner of the sky a smudge, as though a finger dipped in soot had drawn it across the azure, broad at its base, thinned away to where it joined itself by a fine thread to the funnel of a distant steamer. The chalk cliffs of Farnborough rose up above the water in white marble, and the little alabaster finger of the lighthouse showed clear, like a tiny belemnite.

And after they had spent their twenty minutes in contemplation of the scene and wandered to and fro a little along the trampled margin of the cliff, they retrace their steps and make their way into the tea-room of the Royal Arms.

It is a long, low-ceilinged room, that promises little in the way of table luxuries, and keeps its word. A great, bare table runs up the centre of it on trestles, looking like a crocodile; scaly with the involute rings of many glasses, and discolored with the spillings of many liquids. At the far end, in a corner by the window, is an aged piano--more aged than any the Spawer has ever come across, he thinks. He gives an exclamation of amused greeting when his eyes first fall upon it, and throwing up the lid, shakes hands with it most affably. Probably it has never known respectability since the hour of its birth--or at least since it went into the world from the factory. It has been a pot-house creature--changing from pot-house to pot-house, from vaults to cosy, from cosy to smoke-room, and from smoke-room to private bar--until its landing here from Hunmouth three years ago. It has the cracked, dissipated, nasal voice of a chucker-out, accustomed to hurl vile-chorded epithets against a roomful of rowdy soakers, and knows nothing of tune, never having heard any. But such as it is, it is a distinct discovery and an acquisition to the present company.

"My good fellow," the Spawer tells it, "it is plain you know nothing of my friends Brahms and Beethoven--to say nothing of Chopin. Later on I must certainly introduce you. It would n't be fair to them to leave you unacquainted when such a fine opportunity offers."

But for the present they take their places at the end of the crocodile table, where a cloth has been spread, with a pewter tea-pot stand; a glass bowl of some very azure and crystallised lumps of sugar; a dried seed-cake, set out on a tri-colored tissue paper doyley; some treacly marmalade; some butter; and a meagre miscellany of cheese-cakes. Ah, how different from Pam's cooking and Pam's management, all these--and yet, under the circumstances, quite enjoyable too, as a sort of super-exalted jest. An under-sized girl in a full-sized apron, who tilts the end of a big tray at such an angle upward, in front of her, to sustain it at all, that she appears, on approach, to be walking on her knees, ministers to their needs. She gives Pam an oppressed greeting, for Pam knows her and she knows Pam, but her eye is mainly occupied with the Spawer. She is visibly impressed with his importance, but the impression, like all else about the Royal Arms, does not run to superfluous courtesy. When he addresses a remark to her that she has not heard, she tilts up her chin, sideways on, and screwing her lips to inquiry says: "Eh?" or "M'm?" When he asks for a knife she demands: "En't ye got one?" and when he removes his elbow to look, sees for herself he has n't, and tells him, "Ah thought ah 'd setten two," as though that explained everything. The Spawer thanks her liberally for all she does for them, but never once can he succeed in forcing a "Thank you" from her in return.

But it 's all very jolly and entertaining. Pam pours out the tea.

"Sugar and cream mine for me, dear girl," the Spawer bids her, "while I tackle the ham."

"How many do you take?" Pam asks him.

"As many as you like to give me," the Spawer tells her. "I promise I won't complain."

"I 'll give you one and a bit, then," Pam says. "Then you can come again if you like."

"How good of you," says the Spawer.

And altogether they are very happy indeed. They eat part of their ham and eggs with dreadful deadly Bengal metal forks, and cut them with leaden-looking knives, bone-hafted, that are warranted "Real Sheffield Steel," without compromising any particular maker by name.

And they urge each other to fresh helpings of the dried seed-cake, that probably began its public career last Bank Holiday; and partake of the fly-blown cheese-cakes, so great is their exaltation. At times too, those necessary words are almost upon the Spawer's lips. The moment seems propitious. Only let him swallow this mouthful, and he will tell her ... he will say to her:

"Dear girl..."

Then the Dear Girl smiles, or the Dear Girl turns her head, or the Dear Girl forestalls his words with words infinitely more desirable, or catches his eye, and sends it back with as guilty a feeling as though he were a top-story lodger trying to sneak down the staircase for a bucket of coal, and intercepted with his nose at the door and the bucket in his hand.

*CHAPTER XIX*

And meanwhile, as he removed himself more completely from the girl by resolve, they came closer to each other in spirit. At the piano against the window, looking out upon a poultry-run and the profile of three meagre swing-boats, the Spawer sat down and made music, and the music--even from this cracked, tin-plate, pot-house piano--seemed to sum up all the goodness, all the charity, all the kindness, all the happiness of the day; give it a pure and hallowed expression, as the night's thanksgiving prayer gives blessed articulation to the hidden processes of the soul. It was a mantle, this music that the Spawer made, enfolded about them both. Their two lives, at this moment, were silver streams of content, that met in melodious estuary, and flowed henceforth with one broad current towards the infinite.

Ah! Dangerous state of exaltation this, when souls seem severed from the body, and feel no clog of their fleshy burthens binding them to sordid earth. When spirits are so emancipated from the material that a breath can almost blow them; when life seems to have lost all root in worldly soil, but is merely the blessed sweet odor, hovering above the blossom of existence. While the Spawer played the sky deepened. It seemed to descend like a beneficent angel from heaven and clasp the swing-boats in a celestial embrace, so that they slumbered with the deep peace that comes from above. Pallid harvest stars opened places for themselves in the curtain of blue dusk and peeped down upon the scene. Night threw down her lawny veil of mist, that wound the world dreamily in its filmy folds and hid the realities of existence. The life of toil and labor, the life of matter and the life of fact--these lives were no more, they were merged in a delightful life of dreams. To think was to do. Activity was merely a beautiful unfolding of the soul, delivered of all gross physical exertion, like the expansion of a cloud or the dreamy convolution of a puff of white steam. Pam and the Spawer were no longer flesh and blood; they were the disembodied souls of themselves. They were their own thoughts, disencumbered of the flesh, merged delightfully into each other, and moving by volition amid a world of dreams. Everything that lay about them was symbolised into sublime moral truths, into doctrines of love and charity. All the world, all their doings, were dreams.

They dreamed they left the piano and bought more tea-biscuits at six a penny, and wandered forth (without any consciousness of legs) to redeem their promise to the donkeys. After much wandering, they dreamed they found them and fed them. Divine symbolism of love. And the girl dreamed she kissed their noses and said many good-bys. Kissed the donkeys' noses? Did she really kiss _their_ noses? Or were these kisses, cashed upon the donkeys' noses, but the kisses of love and happiness drawn upon the bank of universal love about them, and paid into the treasury of their joint content? And she wound her soft dream arms about the donkeys' necks. But in this nebulous state of bliss, where all thoughts, all actions, all love, and all happiness seemed shared in common, and indivisible, like the particles of gases that shift and move and change their relative positions, but do not alter their substantial bulk, it might have been that her dream arms wound about the Spawer's dream neck. They dreamed their way to the cliff edge to take farewell of the sea, that lay out with a silver-grey sheen upon its blue depth. On the same seat they sat again, with their backs to the contracting shapelessness of the Royal Arms and the west, whose dusky cheek the setting sun tinged to crimson like the blush of a beautiful Creole. The penetrating eye of Farnborough looked out at them from across the water, took stock of them and closed itself once more. Anon it looked this way again, to see if they were still there, and there they were. Many strange scenes of love, in all love's aspects, has the far-seeing eye of Farnborough witnessed in its day, by the side of the water along this coast. What it does not know of these emotions--as well as of the comedies and tragedies of death--is not worth knowing.

They dreamed, these two did, that they rose again and wandered a little along the cliff line. They dreamed they saw a faint phosphorescent pallor away over the water, and the Spawer dreamed he said:

"It is the moon. Let's see it rise."

So they dreamed themselves on to another seat, and sat together and watched the moon push its red rim, like the edge of a new penny, above the misty horizon. And they watched it turn to gilt as it rose and threw aside its veil of mist, and mount up at last like a beautiful goddess with a fair white body. They dreamed themselves back to the old bench once more, at the head of the zigzag steps, cut in the face of the cliff for descent to the beach.

"Let us sit down here a bit," the Spawer said; and they dreamed they seated themselves.

The eye of Farnborough looked out searchingly for the bench, and found it at last, with this twain on it, and said "Aha!" and winked itself out again. In the growing light of the moon the girl's silvery face shone forth from the shimmering mist like a planet. Was he going to tell her here what he had to say? ...

Or was he going to wind his arms about her and kiss her, kiss her, kiss her? Would she resent? or would she melt into his embrace like a drop of water in strong wine? Ah, torture of temptation. St. Anthony scarce suffered by comparison with this. The moon, the sea, the vastness of the night, the stars, the winding mist, the exaltation--rising up like fumes from their communion of this day--were all commingled in his soul, making his emotions infinite. He was a poor weak mortal, suffering the Olympian passion of a god. One moment his arms were almost about her--though he never stirred. The next he was holding up his purpose like a burning crucifix before his passion's eyes ... and all the while the girl sat with her face to the moon, and he with his face sideways upon hers.

Then the prolonged silence woke the girl to a sense of something impending--that sense, so fine and subtle in her sex, that tells it, by one quick touch, as of an antenna, what man must exercise all the processes of his reason to discover.

"Shall we ... be going back?" she suggested, part rising, with a tentative hand upon the seat, for she felt the silence as the dangerous filaments of a web that was being woven about her for some sort of captivity.

"Oh ... if you are tired of this..." he responded.

"I am not tired of it," she said.

"Let 's stay a little longer, then," he proposed. "Shall we?"

"If you like..." the girl said.

The submissive rustle of her sinking back sounded like a sigh. They were very dreamy the two of them.

And again the temptation of St. Anthony commenced. What devils were struggling for possession of him? Why was he delaying matters? Every moment threw the girl more upon his hands. He had only to drop his voice, to whisper, to put out his dream arms, to enfold her, to stifle her lips under dream kisses.... And with what object this?

Ah!

Love is no analyst; does not profess to be; does not want to be. Pure love and love unworthy are one and the same at the crisis. Whether the flame is the flame of an evil incendiary or the spontaneous flame of pure affinity ... it is all one when it burns. She was there; there by his side. There to be taken ... or there to be left. Should he take her? Should he leave her? And while he temporised thus with the devils, before ceding the keys of his inner soul ... the girl was on her feet again.

"Perhaps we ought to be going ... don't you think?"

Fool that he was. The moment was by again. This was no time for his arm.

"Plainly ... you are in a hurry to be rid of me." His laugh was infectiously frank and free. "Am I such poor company?"

"It 's growing late," the girl said, evading the dangerous quicksand of his question. "I 'm afraid ... they 'll be wondering what's got me, at home."

"Ah, is it such a naughty girl as that? Don't they trust her?"

"They don't know where I am. I did n't tell them."

"Do you always tell them?"

"Not always...."

"Good girl. She shall have a white mark for telling the truth."

"But ... this afternoon I did n't know ... that I was coming here. They may be anxious."

"Suppose we walk as far as the other seat before going back. Would that make them very, very anxious?"

"Perhaps we might walk as far as that ... if you wish."

And they walked--a whole legion of devils in attendance upon the man. The searching eye, gazing keenly along the cliff from seat to seat, found them once more at the second, and blinked knowingly. "The old, old comedy," it told itself. But for all that, it was not quite the old, old comedy of the true Shippus sort. The devils were practically in possession of the dream-Spawer's soul, but the dream-Spawer was so completely detached from the real Spawer's body that no physical manifestation took place. The dream-Spawer, floating to and fro above the small, pitiful, carnal presentment, like a balloon in oscillation, wound dream arms about the girl, pressed dream kisses upon her lips, felt her own dream arms wind celestially about his neck; suffocated all remorse, all scruples, all purpose, all resolution, beneath kisses soft and seductive as the roseate clouds of a July sunset ... but there was no contact with the earthly Spawer. All this the vast dream-Spawer did, but the small earthly Spawer beneath stood still and looked at the sea.

And a little later the searching eye from Farnborough, stealing a sly glimpse at the second seat, said a sudden "Hello!" and gazed in unconcealed, wide-open surprise. "H'm!" it reflected, in a tone of considerable disappointment. "So they 've gone at last. Sorry I could n't see the end of that business. Wonder where they are now."

But it had other little episodes to keep its eye upon--Merensea, Farnborough, and even Spathorpe way--and could not afford to waste time in useless regrets.

*CHAPTER XX*

The crisis was over, but the danger of relapse remained. The dream had not been broken, it had merely been prolonged. Slowly or suddenly, the awakening was bound to come. Every step of the homeward road that they took was unwinding their dream like a skein of worsted. And now, incredulous as it may seem, with the homeward end in view, the Spawer recommenced to apply himself, by a kind of feverish rote, to the preparation of the task that he had been so ready to cast down.

They passed the group of cottages where--ages and ages ago, one blazing August afternoon--they had called to visit a dying man. He would be dead now. The Spawer had troubled his last moments with a hymn-tune on a cacophonous harmonium that emitted a discordant clamor like a flock of geese in full prayer; and the girl had read him a chapter out of St. Mark--or was it Matthew or Luke?--John perhaps. What a pious, smug-faced fellow he had felt himself in those days. Almost fit for heaven. And in these! He gazed, with the girl, at the little yellow square of light as they passed, that showed where the scene had taken place, and thought of Now and Then. All the air was saturated with moonlight. It looked too thick to breathe. A great exhalation rose up from the pores of the earth, tremulous as a mystic bridal-veil worn on the brow of Nature. The hedges swooned away on either side of them. The sky drooped dizzily. Sounds, filtered and languorous, percolated through the supernatural stillness, with a strange distinctness and purity. The cries of children at play, robbed of all earthly meaning and wondrously tranquillised, as though uttered from the far-away abode of the blest; the barking of dogs; the call of shepherds; the coughing of sheep; the lowing of cattle; the unexpected cry of birds; the beating of metal on some distant anvil, like the ringing of an angelus bell; the slamming of remote gates--all spiritualised and purified, as though they came from one world, and these two occupied another. There was a melancholy and solitude about the earth that made them feel as though they were among the shades; as though they were dead (very peacefully), and the sun would never rise upon hard realities again; but as though, from now henceforth through eternity, their souls might wander in misty moonlight.

And still they walked, and still he had not told her. Still his soul was divided in conflict between the desire to relapse himself to the dream and the necessity to meet that promissory I.O.U. of honor which he had given to himself. All the time he was practising overtures; trying phrases in his mind by which he could approach the subject casually, without allowing the girl to perceive the degraded tortuous trail over which he had been crawling to it on his moral belly all this morning, and all this afternoon, and all this evening. From the thick moonlight, as they walked, other shades detached themselves of a sudden, as though they had but that moment been fashioned out of the tremulous mist, met them walking more slowly, and were absorbed into the mist again on the Shippus side behind them, like ink-spots in blotting-paper. Silent couples, walking wordless and sometimes apart, but wrapped in their own amorous atmosphere, and always with that strange, lingering communion of step, that concentration of purpose, as though a magnet were drawing them forward in slumber. And already, here and there, through the hedges and through branches of distant trees and in the moonlit sky, were gleaming the dull yellow of blind-drawn casements and the scintillating beams of naked lamps that betokened Ullbrig.

And still he had not told her.

A bat, fluttering blindly over the dusky hedgerow and steering itself erratically on its course like an uncertain cyclist, flew almost into the girl's face and wheeled off abruptly, so that she felt the waft of its wing on her cheek and gave a little cry of surprise.

"What is the matter with you, dear girl?" The Spawer turned quickly at the sound. "You have n't twisted your foot?"

"No, no." The girl held up a face of reassurance in the moonlight. "It's nothing ... only a bat."

"And what did the naughty bat do to her to frighten her so?"

"It did n't frighten me really. I thought it was going to fly in my face. It startled me at first ... that's all."

"It was a bad, wicked bat to fly in her face and startle her at first." He took hold of her arm. At the touch of that round, warm, live member all the blood in her body seemed to jump to issue with his, and combine, as though one great pulsing artery fed them both. "Come along," he said lightly, striving with his voice to palliate the tremulous danger of their union. "I won't have this dear girl frightened. I will take care of her."

She made no demur, either to his words or to his touch, but came along by his side; so warm, so wonderfully alive, so spiritually silent.

"Will she trust him to take care of her?" he asked her softly. And after a moment: "Will she?" for she had not answered a word. She said "Yes" very faintly, with the faintness of happiness.

"It is a good girl," he said caressingly, "... and she shall be well taken care of." He pressed confidence into that supple trunk of arm. "But she must try and be as kind to me as she can ... now." He waited to give her the opportunity of asking him, Why? but she did not. She was in the ethereal state that takes everything for granted. "Because ... well ... because she did n't believe me this afternoon. She thought I was only telling tarradiddles. Now did n't she? But it was n't tarradiddles at all, at all. It was something far worse than tarradiddles."

He felt the sudden thrill of awakening alarm run through her; but still she said no word, asked no questions, left everything to him.

"What does the good little girl say?" he asked her--oh, so lightly! With his hand on her arm, with the pain of parting quite merged in the warm consolatory current of their common blood, penance seemed a light, a meaningless thing. What was departure but a delightful occasion for kisses and comfort ... till the dread moment came? The good little girl trembled a little, he thought, but said nothing. "Does n't she say she 's sorry? Come, come. Surely she 's not such a heartless little girl as not to say she 's sorry?"

This time the girl twisted a swift, startled face of inquiry towards his own half-bantering smile.

"I thought..." she began, and stopped with the abruptness of fear.

"Yes, yes; I know you did," he laughed. "I told you so. You thought I was just telling a great big fib, did n't you? ... because I did n't want to bind myself to the ordeal of any more harmonium."

"You don't mean ... you 're going away?"

"Should you be very sorry?" he asked her.

She did not speak, but seemed, in the moonlight, to be looking at him as though she were trying to absorb his meaning, to see if there were any other sense below the surface of his words.

"Are you really ... going?" she asked him, after a while.

The intentness of her look and the wondrous depth of her great eyes--stirred now to troubled speculation--sent his purpose reeling aslant again.

"Ah!" He gave her arm a protesting squeeze. "She 's not going to give her sorrow away until she 's quite sure there 's genuine necessity for it. She 's a very wise and very cautious little woman. She wants good security for any small advances of commiseration. If I did n't know for certain that her name was what it is ... I should be inclined to think they called her Rachel or Leah or Abigail or Zipporah--with something of Benjamin or Isaacs or Ishmael about it. Never mind. I will trust her with my gold watch, and she shall give me what she likes on it. Yes, little Israelite ... it was the truth that this unfortunate Gentile spoke this afternoon. He knows it was ... because he does n't speak it so often but that he can tell the taste. He 's been loafing about happily for a long time ... but the eternal policeman Destiny has given him the office to move on, and it seems he 'll have to move. It 's no use getting cross with the law. Is she sorry for him now, this little Usurer?"

"But you 're not going away ... at once?" she asked him, in a startled voice.

"My gracious! What an out-and-out extortioner she is," the Spawer exclaimed, with an assumption of admiring tribute. "She won't advance me a cent of sympathy until she knows the term of the loan. If I say I 'm going at once, she 'll give me a better price of pity than if the advance is to drag on over an indefinite period of weeks." He made pretence to throw his chin in the air and laugh with pleasure. "Honestly, little Rebecca," he told her, looking down once more, "I don't want to humbug a penny more out of you than you think you ought to give. At present I can't say when I go ... whether I have to go to-morrow, the day after, the day after that ... or next week even. It all depends on a letter. I 'm a condemned man, under indefinite reprieve." He paused for a moment, balancing whether he should say the next thing on his mind. "As a matter of fact, little woman...." He turned his face towards her with the engaging air of candor that seemingly could not deny itself. "... It 's no use trying to stuff you. You 're too sharp to take a dummy watch with the works out, or a gilt sixpence. So ... as it 's not a bit of good trying to be anything else ... I 'll be frank with you. I 'll tell you a secret. It 's a big one--all about myself. Do you think you can keep a secret?"

"I 'll try," said the girl, with her eyes fixed apprehensively on his lips.

"Well, then..." he said. "I 'm in your hands. I 'm going to do a very silly thing."

Did a tremor of apprehensive pain, like the very ghost of a shiver, run up the arm that he held? or was it his own mind, that through a feeling of sympathy sought to attribute its knowledge to hers?

"You 'll think me a frightful ass, no doubt, when I tell you what it is. Can you guess?"

The girl seemed to concentrate her look upon him, but whether the true answer had flashed across her mind, or whether the flash of divination merely served to dazzle her and make her ignorance still darker, so that she looked for enlightenment from him, he could not tell; but she said "No," and gave up his riddle with a shake of the head.

"I wish you 'd guessed," he said. "It throws it all on to my shoulders. Now I shall have to hoist the confession up like my own portmanteau, and perhaps look a bigger ass than ever, with my knees all bent under it. Anyhow, here goes--one, two, three ... I 'm going to be married.

"Well?" he inquired, after a pause. "Won't you say you 're sorry now? It 's all my own silly fault, I know, and I deserved to be married for being such a fool ... but still--can't you squeeze one little drop of pity for me?"

"Are you really going to be married?" asked the girl. She spoke in a very level and, it struck him, a very unemotional voice.

"Great goodness, little woman," he exclaimed, "what an unbelieving Israelite you are! Do you think I do a wholesale and export trade in tarradiddles? You did n't use to suspect me before, even when I told you I was a great composer. Won't you believe me now, when I 'm willing to confess myself an awful idiot? On my word and conscience, then ... I 'm going to be married."

"I hope ... you 'll be very, very happy," said the girl.

For her, he thought the words and the wish somewhat prosaic. At this moment she lacked one of those beautiful little emotional touches with which she could illuminate the simplest saying to poetry. Her voice, soft though it was, and so full of sympathetic interest, yet struck him with a painful feeling of matter-of-fact. He and his marriage seemed suddenly stuck up in hard, unpoetic affirmation, like the tin price-shield in a pork-pie. The subtlety of artistic suggestion was altogether lacking, all the romance was gone. The thing he had wished delicately hinting at, a mysterious romantic melody for _celli con sordini_, to suit the orchestra of the evening and of their mood, was become a commonplace tune for a drunken cornet to play outside a public-house door on Saturday night. All at once he began to feel that the coverlet of dreams was fast slipping away from him. The moonlight was clearer: the hedges harder in outline. In spite of the hand that lay on the girl's arm, as though to retain that part of the dream at any rate, they were no longer spiritually united. There was an intangible, invisible, impalpable something between them as keen as the sword of flame at the Gate of the Garden of Eden. Like many another martyr before him, in his crucial hour the roseate illusions that had fortified him to his purpose were floating away from him now, and leaving him only his actual senses to realise externals and apprise him of the horrible pangs of suffering. Before, he had been temporising at the stake; trying the rope to see how its bondage felt, without allowing the cruel loops to cut into his flesh; posturing as martyr before the girl in mind only--but now he had made the girl a participant of his purpose.

And the worst of it was that he must profess that the parting meant nothing so very much to either of them. He must not insult the girl by suggesting that his going affected only her--that she would deeply feel the loss of him who felt her loss so little that he was leaving her for another. And yet! And yet!

O Lord! And yet! All his present life was but a meaningless series of disjunctive conjunctions; words of contingency and speculation; ifs, buts, supposes, peradventures, perchances, and the like.

"I say ... you 're very silent, little woman," he remarked, after a while. "Don't be hard on a fellow because he 's down on his luck. You 're not offended with me, are you?"

"Offended with you?" she said. "Oh, no, indeed. What should make me offended ... with you?"

He made believe to laugh.

"Well, I don't know what should. Only ... perhaps because you 're disappointed to find that I 'm just as much an ass as any other man. Oh, music 's nothing to do with it, believe me. A man may play like an angel on the piano--as I do--and yet play as giddy a goat as any on four legs, in real life, as I 've done. But what 's done is done. I was younger in those days, perhaps. All the same, I 'm not too old for a little sympathy. Say something to me, won't you?"

"I hardly know what to say," said the girl. "I was trying to think."

"Say something to give me a little courage, then," he suggested; "something to strengthen my knees a little. You don't know how white-livered and weak-kneed it makes a man feel when the marriage noose is round his neck, and he seems to hear the bell tolling, and sees the chaplain getting out his little prayer-book, and knows his hour 's approaching to be launched into eternity."

Even to himself he recognised how beautifully his words were serving the purpose of concealing truth with truth. No girl on earth--certainly not the girl by his side--could have probed his utterances, in that candid voice of his, and said: "You are speaking the truth. You are going to this wedding like a weak-kneed cur, and all the time you are trying to cling to me for comfort and consolation--and yet trying not to demean yourself in my eyes by letting me know it. I am the girl you love, and you are trying to experience the pleasure of my love vicariously; by proxy, as it were. If I were in the other one's place, and she were in mine, not all the waters of the world would keep you apart from her."

No, no. His smiling, semi-serious words were like a rosewood veneer over deal wood, and there was no penetrating them.

They were close on Hesketh's corner now. He had told her all, and he had told her nothing. Words--hundreds, thousands, millions of words were still wanting to make the parting as it should be.

And all at once he felt the power of the dream returning; the impulse to take the girl in his arms; to kiss her; to tell her that he was but jesting, and that he loved her above everything and everybody in the world; pawn all his future, with its honor and duty, for the pleasure of that one glorious avowal. How could he let her depart out of that empty leave-taking without a word, a sign, when his heart was like a vast sea, and she the spirit moving on its waters? Even as he thought of it his fingers tightened possessively upon the girl's warm arm; his lips dropped persuasively; the words seemed to rise to his mouth as easily as bubbles to the surface of water, for the mere thinking.

"You have not said ... you are sorry I am going yet," he told her. "Are you sorry?"

Did the girl tremble? Her face was turned away from him. Was she laughing or was she crying?

"Are you sorry?" he asked her again pleadingly, conveying by inflection what he wished her answer to be; his lips lower towards her still.

"Yes..."

He caught the word, but it was more like a shiver--as though all the tissues of her body had conspired to give it tremulous birth, like the whispering of a tree. Her head was still turned from him.

"Very sorry?" he pressed her. "Tell me. See; lift up your face..." His own face sank lower, as low as the hat brim. "... You are not crying?"

He released his hold of the girl's arm, slid his hand about her and drew her to him by the waist. Into that warm socket she yielded submissively, like a child into its cradle. She was his now; his in all but the asking. They were still walking, but their walk was the ghostly stepless progress of a mist moving across the meadows. The dream was back again, and the gloriousness of it. He put out his left hand, with the basket hanging from its wrist, and took the girl's soft warm chin to pull it gently towards his lips.

"Pam..." he said.

Out of the yellow moonlight, or out of the denser substance of the hedges, or out of the earth at their feet, was shaped suddenly the motionless figure of a man. Whether he had been there from the first, or had come there by approach, or had overtaken them, appeared not. As though he were a black pestle in an alchemist's mortar, he seemed deposed there, without movement or volition of his own. At sight of him all the dream was precipitated in sediment of actuality, that fell down to the ground in fine, imperceptible residue, like the shattered particles of a bubble. The Spawer's arm slid to his side, and they dropped apart several paces, guiltily.

"It is the schoolmaster," Pam said, awakening out of the sleep with a voice of sudden terror, under her breath. "... I must be going."

The Spawer commenced to hum, and craning his neck up to the moon as though he were aware of this orb for the first time, made pleasant allusion in a clear, uncompromising voice to "A jolly fine night." The man was on Pam's side of the road. As they reached him the girl stopped.

"They have been looking for you," the man said.

"I am here," Pam answered, in her old clear voice.

The man did not move. He remained there motionless, seeming to take the words as an intimation that she would accompany him. Pam held out her hand for the basket that the Spawer was swinging with an assumption of negligence and ease.

"Thank you," she said.

The dark figure of the man embarrassed all speech. The Spawer handed the basket over into her hands without a word.

"And the serviette..." he said, drawing it from his pocket.

Pam received it from him and thanked him again.

Then there was a slight pause.

"Good-night!" she said.

"Good-night!"

They shook hands with a strange and ludicrous politeness.

Had they been naughty children, and this stranger the angry parent of one of them, they could not have parted under a deeper cloud of ignominy and disgrace.

*CHAPTER XXI*

The "Good-night" so soullessly inflected, that the girl gave to the Spawer with her tepid fingers of politeness, was to her the leave-taking of all her happiness. In joy she was an orphan. Her heart was choking her as she surrendered herself to the sombre shadow in the roadway; the black anchor that seemed to hold her fast now at the end of an iron cable. If she could have died then, in her mingled agony and shame, sorrow, mortification, and sickening despair, she would have wished it. For a while no word was spoken. She and the gloomy figure of the man walked towards Ullbrig together, very far apart, without looking at each other, almost as though they were ignoring each other's presence. A great silent wall of division rose up between them, a barrier of disgrace, on the shady side of which walked Pam. Through all this silence was going on a mighty struggle. The man, with throbbing neck and veins of whipcord in his forehead, was desperately striving to find his pretext to scale the barrier or break through and speak to the girl on ground of common understanding, but a sense of shame for what he had seen withheld him. Great waves of heat and cold swept him alternately. That which he had witnessed chilled him with a horrible fear for the terrors of that which he had not witnessed, and yet fired him to torrid anguish. That embrace that had struck him sickly to stone in the roadway ... was it the beginning, or was it the end? Had the girl been playing him false all through? With the magnified doubts of his class concerning the evil magnetism of musicians and the slackness of their scruples, his heart was wrung with horrible apprehensions as to how far the Spawer possessed this power, and how far he had used it. Was this girl--whom he loved with a pure, blind, white-heat passion--was she, while scorning his approaches, so deeply infatuated with the visitor from the Cliff that she coveted rather to be the temporary toy of the one than the honored wife of the other? The doubt stung him to the quick. He wanted to speak, yet dared not for fear his words might betray this thorny crown of his torture. Oh, what he would have given to know the history of that walk from Shippus to Ullbrig; what would he not have given to be able to wipe it out of all their lives and memories as though it had never been.

"Let me ... carry your basket," he said awkwardly, after a while. He tried to round his voice mentally before using it, to file down its roughness of emotion; but it came out hoarse and unequal in spite of him.

To the girl, troubled with her own personal misery and the gnawing misery of speculation as to how much of her weakness he had witnessed, and what he was thinking of her, and the acute irksomeness of his presence at this crisis of her life, when she sought only solitude, the mere relinquishing of the basket seemed like another surrender. She clung to it in spirit, as though it were a straw on the black waters of her foundering.

"It is nothing ... thank you," she told him. "I can carry it."

He felt the resistance to his offer, and the motive that urged it, and the blood swept up about his head again. The girl, though she did not look at him, saw the hands go up to his throat.

"You were ... not carrying it ... before," he hazarded.

"We are so near home." The girl hesitated, and there was a tremble in her voice. "You may carry it, if you like," she said, and handed it to him.

"Thank you."

He took it from her with an awkward scuffle of untutored politeness. Even as he felt the pride of the possession he felt the shame and degradation of it too--to walk by the side of her as the Spawer had done; to carry her basket as the Spawer had done; to try and delude his poor, anguished soul with these fragments of a banquet to which he had been an uninvited spectator (a guest never), and make himself believe he was in some sort enjoying her favor. Ah, poor fool! poor fool! By his side walked the phantom figure of the Spawer, communing with the girl, and his miserable guard of flesh and blood was powerless to prevent it, or intercept the messages of remembrance passing between them. Ah, if he could; if he could. All his life was bound up in the girl. He had wrestled for her in body and soul. On his knees he had prayed for her, begging God to give her to him, to incline her heart, to soften her, to pour into her breast the grace to love him. He had got out of his bed to pray for her in the sleepless night-time when she ... had been dreaming-of this visitor, perhaps ... And now.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her suddenly, in a low drenched voice. The words rushed up to his mouth on a tide of hot blood.

The girl had felt the imminence of the attack. She had been, in spirit at least, a participant of the man's agony; had felt the blood rushing up again and again with its impulsion of speech.

"What do you mean?" she asked faintly, and turned her head aside momentarily, as though to the gust of a strong wind.

"Have you been fair to me?" he asked her again.

For very fear he dared not alter these words that he had once uttered and was sure of, lest the alteration might involve him too much.

"I have not been unfair..." she said.

She put out the defence like an arm that almost recognises the justice of the blow aimed, and makes no real effort to ward it.

"You have been very unfair," he said hoarsely. "You know you have been very unfair. Even your voice betrays you." He was on the point of calling upon his eyes for corroboration of her unfairness, but he stopped himself with an effort that the girl heard and understood. "You made me a promise," he said. "One night ... what did you promise?"

"It was n't a promise," the girl protested. "I never promised you anything. I told you I dared not promise ... and I could n't promise ... and I did n't promise."

"It was a promise," he said again. "If it was n't a promise ... it was your word, and I trusted your word. You said there was no bar to my loving you. You told me ... and you know you told me, that I might go on loving you, and try to win ... your esteem. All this time I have been believing you and your word.... Are you going to tell me now that I 've misjudged you?"

He spoke very rapidly and jerkily and hoarsely, as though he were himself ashamed of this necessity to put his thoughts into words and hear them.

"I only said it because ... it was because you pressed me so hard. You would not take my answer. You looked so ill." The slow stream of tears was trickling through the broken pauses of her speech. "It was you that put the words into my mouth. You told me it would kill you if I said there was no hope. How could I say there was no hope? I could n't; I could n't. You forced me to say that you might go on loving me ... but I told you it was n't a promise."

Her tears were running with her words now. She wept for herself and for this man. The thing she had been dreading, it had come to pass. She was an Ullbrig hypocrite, a deceiver, a faith-breaker, an actor and a worker of lies.

Ah, miserable little sinner, whose only sin perhaps, had she known it, was the sin of an overflowing, over-generous heart ... her day of reckoning was upon her now, and her tears were bitter.

They walked along in silence for a step or two. Though the man by her side was burning to burst forth in a fiery Etna of denunciation and reproach, to subjugate her and gain dominion over her by the sheer conflagration of righteous anger, he dared not, lest she might admit his charges, confess herself a sinner, and own an unconquerable disregard of him. To be allied to her by an indefinite hope, frail as a silkworm's thread, was heavenly compared with the blank severance of despair. He was a retainer upon her favor, and must keep his place. What authority he held, to assume authority over her, came from her.

"You told me ... I might love you," he said, straining his voice to breaking point in his fierce desire to hold it steady and keep its control, "... that there was no other bar--no other bar. Have you been making a mock of me all this time?"

"No, no." He knew the girl's two hands were together in their agony of protestation, but they both spoke with their faces unturned, each looking before them fixedly. "Believe anything of me ... but that," she begged him. "I have never mocked you. I would never mock you."

He hesitated a moment, and then:

"Are you ... making a mock of yourself?" he asked her.

The question shook her first like a wind, and then stilled her suddenly.

"What do you mean?" she asked him.

"Are you making a mock of yourself?"

They were at the first of the houses now, in the little high street, and there were figures moving about between them and the Post Office; figures that might stop; figures that might speak; figures that might peer into her tear-stained face when the light of some yellow window shone on it.

"I cannot go on ... like this," she said, with a half-sob and a shiver. "I 'm not fit to meet anybody. Let us turn back."

They turned back, facing the moon. The girl walked with her white, troubled face set before her, glistening under its tears, like a second moon. The man, stealing one covert look at it, saw that no resumption of this subject was likely from her quarter. She was in the clairvoyant state of trouble that would have led her to Shippus again, unchecked, without a word.

"You say you have not made a mock of me," he took up again, in his monotonous, tightened voice, "... but you are making a mock of somebody. Who is it? Is it yourself?"

"Why am I making a mock of somebody?" the girl asked.

"Is it fair to yourself?" he said, and his voice grew tighter and tighter, "... to be taking walks down the Shippus road ... at night ... with a stranger? You know ... what sort of a reputation the Shippus road has at night-time. You know what sort of company ... you are likely to meet ... what sort of company you have met to-night." His voice so constricted about his throat that it seemed like to strangle him. "Is it fair to yourself ... putting me out of the question altogether ... that you should give people ... give them the opportunity of saying ... saying things about you?"

The girl had no answer but the faster flow of her tears. She knew well enough that he had spoken no more than the truth. Judged from an external standpoint, she looked no better than her misguided sisters--farm wenches and hinds' lasses--that wandered to their shame by the hedgerows under the shades of night. And for this, and all her other delinquencies, and all her other sins, unhappinesses, and penances of suffering ... she wept.

"I think too much of you ... ever to risk bringing you within reach of people's slanders. I would rather cut my hand off ... than that I should hear you spoken lightly of. To me ... your character is more sacred than my own. I would guard it with my life if need be. But what is it ... to others?" The reins of his passion slipped his grasp a little; the girl's tearful endurance encouraged him to speak more forcibly. "What do men of towns care for the character ... of a girl? They come to-day and they go to-morrow. What does it matter to them whether they leave shame ... and broken hearts behind? A girl's heart is a plaything for them ... and when they have broken it ... they throw it aside. There are plenty more hearts to be broken in the big cities."

Like all others of his untraveled kind, he had the wild, generic idea of cities and of the large places of the earth as being seats of sinfulness and iniquity. Wickedness filled them and saturated the dwellers therein. Outside Ullbrig, and the little bit of Yorkshire contiguous with which he was acquainted, the rest of the world (of which he had the fleetingest personal knowledge) was Sodom and Gomorrah. All the men who came from afar, and had the faint traces of fashion about their raiment, were men of danger; ministers of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Perhaps, in his own narrow track of ignorant bigotry, he was not so very far from the truth after all; but it shocks one's cosmopolitan soul to have to subscribe to such tenets. Not because of what they contain, but because of the uncatholicity of the formula--a very stocks, indeed, for the confinement of one's belief.

"What does it matter ... to him ... whether he makes you food for people's tongues? All he cares about is his own pleasure and gratification. The attentions ... of such a man ... are an insult in themselves. He will know you down here, for his own purposes ... will flatter you ... will walk with you; but would he know you in the towns? Would he walk with you ... before his fine friends? No, he would not. He is treating you as though you were a rose by the roadside, to be plucked and cast away the moment he is tired of you. Your friends are not his friends. You ought to see it ... and know it. You have no right to be associating yourself ... with a man whose acquaintance ... is so ambiguous. Does it matter to him that you are seen with him ... along the Shippus lane by night? Does he care whether you are the talk of every corner and gateway? Does he ask for you honorably ... as I do, and seek to guard your reputation by every means in his power? No, no. When your name has become a byword he will go back to his fine ladies and forget all about you."

"It is not true. You are wrong," Pam struck in tearfully, catching at the breast furthest away from him and pressing under it with her rounded hand as though to hold up her weak and trembling body, "... wickedly wrong. You have no right to say those things ... and I have no right to listen to you. You think ... because ... because you saw us at Hesketh's corner, and we were together.... But you are mistaken. He met me ... as I was going to Mr. Smethurst's, quite by accident, and went with me. And then ... we had tea ... at Shippus together, and music, and stayed to watch the moon ... and came back. It was every bit my fault. He does n't know anything about Shippus lane ... and I thought of it, but I dared not tell him. How could I? He has been kinder to me than anybody else in the world--except Father Mostyn. He is a gentleman, and I know it as well as you ... and so does he. Is a gentleman wicked because he 's a gentleman? All the things he has done for me ... he has done without ever taking advantage of his kindness by a single word. Other men have done things for me ... and asked me to love them or marry them at once. He has never played with my heart as you say, or tried to make love ... or make me unhappy. He is too proud to do such things. You are wrong ... wickedly wrong. Because ... you love me ... you think everybody loves me. He likes me ... but he does n't love me. I wish he did. Oh, I wish he did! But I 'm not good enough for him ... and I know it. There has never been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so unhappy that I began to cry. I could n't help it. I did n't think he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then ... then ... you were there and saw. And I love him," she said, almost fiercely--certainly fiercely for Pam--"I love him. I love him, and I tell you. Because he has been kind, and taught me things, and played to me. I love him in the same way I love Father Mostyn. What if he would n't walk with me before his friends? He has walked with me so kindly here ... and made life so happy for me ... that it will be like death without him. Oh, I wish I were dead now! I wish I were dead now that he 's going!"

And turning aside by Lambton's gate, close on Hesketh's corner, she laid her two arms upon the top rail, and lowering her forehead, poured forth her wet sorrow into the loose folds of her handkerchief, with her back upon the man. He stood, mortified and helpless, while the girl's figure shook in the silent agony of wringing forth her tears. Even from her grief he was shut out. He could not touch her, could not solace her, could not draw near upon her. He was but a beggar, permitted by her bounty to sit at the gate of her heart; a wretched, love-stricken leper, whose confessions of homage were as unpleasant to her as the sight of raw wounds. And now she had turned the tables upon his whining reproaches. It was he that stood guilty, not the girl--and yet his guilt was mingled with an exultant sense of triumph too, at the news she had told him. The Spawer was going; this evil weaver of charms was under order of departure. Till then he would hold his tongue; bear with the surging of his love. When once this stumbling-block on the pathway to the girl's heart was removed he could renew his approaches--fill the void, even, that this stranger should leave in it.

"I was actuated ... only by desire for your happiness," he told Pam, after he had suffered her to weep awhile without interruption. "What I have said to you," he tugged at his collar, "has been said ... through love and for love."

The girl raised her head, wiped her eyes with the damp ball of her handkerchief, and put it away into her pocket.

"Let us go back," she said. And not another word passed between them that night.

"'Ave ye brought 'er back wi' ye?" Emma Morland called, coming to the passage end by the big clock, to inquire of the schoolmaster when they entered by the front door, and catching sight of Pam: "Goodness, lass, where 'ave ye been to all this time? We was beginnin' to think ye mud 'a gotten lost."

"I went to take Mr. Smethurst ... his wine," Pam said.

The schoolmaster passed through into the little kitchen.

"Ay, bud ah s'd think 'e 'll 'a drunken it all by this time," Emma exclaimed, with not unkindly sarcasm. She had a reputation, even well deserved, in the district of a tart tongue when occasion called for it--which it frequently did--but to Pam her asperity was something in the nature of a loving shield. She could say the hardest and flintiest utterances to Pam, and yet convey the sense of kindness through them. Her hand, indeed, was bony, but its grasp was tender. "An' 'ow did ye find t' old gentleman? No better, ah s'd think."

"No."

"Nay, 'e 'll nivver be no better i' this wuld, ah doot. They gied ye yer tea, it seems."

"No-o."

"What! En't ye 'ad it, then?"

"Yes, thank you, Emma."

"Where?"

"I had it at Shippus."

"At Shippus. Well, ah nivver! Did ye gan by yersen?"

"I met Mr. Wynne."

"An' 'as 'e been wi' ye all time?"

"Yes."

"'Ave ye onnly just come back?"

"... A little while ago."

Miss Morland's opinion was expressed by a pause.

"Come in an' get yer supper. It 's all sett'n ready."

"I don't want any supper ... thank you, Emma."

"Not want yer supper? What 's amiss wi' ye?"

"Nothing. At least ... I have a headache."

"Ye 'ad n't a headache when ye started."

"It 's the heat. It was very hot in the sun. Where 's uncle?"

"I' t' parlor."

"And aunt?"

"Ay."

"Say good-night to them both for me ... will you, Emma?"

"What ... are ye away to bed?"

"I think ... I shall be better there."

"That 's soon done wi' ye, onnyways."

Emma came closer and took a keen glance into the girl's eyes.

"Ye look to me as though ye 'd been cryin'," she said. "'Ave ye?"

Pam pretended not to hear the question. Moreover, she was quite prepared to cry again at the slightest opportunity. Emma took her by the arm.

"You 're all of a shake," she said, and held the girl under scrutiny. "Pam lass," she said, and dropped her voice to a terrible whisper; "there 's nowt ... nowt wrong wi' ye? Ye 've not been gettin' into trouble?"

"Emma!"

Pam shook herself free of scrutiny with a burning face of repudiation.

"Thank goodness!" Emma said devoutly. "Bud it can 'appen soon enough to onny on ye." Emma testified freely at all times to the frailty of her sex, from which weakness, however, she dissociated herself, as a woman possessed of the superior lamp of wisdom and common-sense kept always burning. And indeed, it shone so conspicuously in her window that any bridegroom of burglarious intentions would have been singularly intrepid not to have been scared away by such a plain indication of this virgin's alertness. "Onnyway," Miss Morland decided, "... seummut 's come tiv ye beside a 'eadache. 'As 'e been sayin' owt tiv ye?"

"Who?"

"Either on 'em."

"How can you, Emma! ..."

"'Ave they?"

"No...."

"Ay ... bud ah 'm none so sure."

"Good-night, Emma."

"Good-night, lass."

But before the others in the parlor Emma spoke with happy unconcern:

"Come yer ways an' let 's 'ave supper," she said, with her head through the door. "Pam weean't be wi' us; she 's ganned to bed. Ah telt 'er she 'd better. Lass 's gotten a 'eadache, plain to see, wi' trampin' about i' sun this afternoon-lookin' after other folks' comfort. Ah div n't want 'er settin' to, to side things away when we 're done. She would, for sure, if she set up. Ah 'd to say good-night to ye both for 'er, she telt me."

And that same evening, during a moment of the schoolmaster's absence, the shoemaker delivered himself of a strange remark to his wife and daughter. He was struggling with the big black Book at the time.

"'Ave ye noticed..." he inquired, in a confidential undertone, and gazing at Emma and his wife over the thick silver rims of his spectacles, "onnything about our Pam, latelins?"

Emma Morland looked up sharply.

"What sewd there be to notice?" she asked, as though the idea were charged with the sublimated essence of the ridiculous.

"Div ye think ... there 's owt betwixt 'er an'..." he jerked his thumb in the supposed direction of the absent one, "t' schoolmester?"

"Div ah think stuff and nonsense!" Emma Morland said.

"Ay, bud ah 'm tellin' ye," the postmaster insisted. "Noo, mark mah wods. Ah 've watched 'em a goodish bit o' late, an' ah 've seed a little o' seummut when they did n't think there was onnybody to see owt."

"What 'ave ye seed wi' ye, then?" Miss Morland inquired sceptically, but with a sharp eye.

"This much," the postmaster told her. "Ah 've seed 'em talkin' together a dozen times when they did n't use to talk one. Ah 've knowed time when they 'd set i' a room while clock ticked round almost, an' them nivver say a wod--or they 'd gan their ways oot after a while, mebbe. Watch an' see if they 'll set i' a room aif a minute noo wi'oot speakin'? Ay, an' ah 've seed 'im kickin' 'is 'eels about passage end for 'er, when 'e did n't think ah knowed owt about 'im, an' she 's come down tiv 'im i' end. Ay, an' ah 've tekt notice on 'im when she 's ganned out o' room. 'E 's all of a fidget to be up an' after 'er, an' get a wod wi' 'er on 'er way back. Ay, an' 'e sets up for 'er when she comes back fro' Vicarage. It 'll be a rum 'un if 'e wants 'er--an' ah 'm ready to lay 'e diz, onny time. Ah div n't know as all could wish better for 'er, so far as my own inclination gans. 'E 'd mek 'er a good 'usband, an' 'ave a good roof to gie 'er, bud ah 'm jealous t' General 'ud 'ave to be considered. An' ah 've my doots whether 'e 's man to think ower much about syke [such] as schoolmesters."

"T' old 'umbug," Miss Morland ejaculated--though whether in reference to the schoolmaster or the General or his Reverence the Vicar, would be a difficult point to decide.

But the subject, temporarily suspended by the entrance of the schoolmaster himself, took deep root in the family imagination--deeper root, still, indeed, in the well-nourished soil of Miss Morland's common-sense, and testing the hypothesis by what she had seen of Pam's conduct to-night, and finding it in accord, she prepared herself to wait and watch events with an eye as keen as that of one of her own needles.

*CHAPTER XXII*

Up rose the sun in the morning as though nothing had happened, and spinning over the red and thatched roofs of Ullbrig, took stock of the harvest fields, the wheat in sheaf and stock, the oats outstanding; measured the work to be done with a jocose eye as though he had said "Aha!" and rubbed his hands in anticipation of a glad time.

Into Pam's bedroom he peeped--prudently, through a corner of the white blind--and found the girl open-eyed upon her bed; thrown across it transversely in abandonment of disorder, with her moistened handkerchief clasped like a snow-ball in one hand. It had been a night of anguish and unutterable torture. She had wept, she had prayed, she had resolved, she had renounced, she had slept--at once the mere fact of sleeping had awakened her--she had tossed from pillow to pillow, turned them incessantly to find some coolness for her fevered cheek; she had risen, and watched from her window the slow arrival of day; had seen the firmament of stars sliding away in the west, like the giant glass of a cucumber frame. The doings of the day before were a delirium. In her dreams the schoolmaster, the dying man, the Spawer, Emma Morland, the tea-room at Shippus, the donkeys, the moon--were all mixed up in a horrid patchwork mantle of remembrance. The Spawer was going. There would be no more music; no more French; no more walks and talks in the morning; no more evenings at the Vicarage; no more evenings at Cliff Wrangham. In the days when they had touched upon this final parting with the light inconsequence for a thing far distant--as people speak of death--she had entered into schemes for the continuance of all the studies that he had inaugurated. She should go to Hunmouth for piano lessons. She should have conversational French lessons _chez_ M. Perron, whose brass plate and dirty windows she had seen often on her visit to Hunmouth. Ah, but that was when the Spawer had been with her. It had been bitter-sweet at times to dwell on future sadness, with the warm hand of present happiness to take hold of, as a little child likes to peer round the bogey-man's corner, holding tight to its mother's fingers.

Now!

Ah, now! All was different. She wanted to die. Life was n't worth living any longer. Now she knew for herself the feeling that the schoolmaster had suffered and told her of: the dull undesire to live, the carelessness of existence, the agonies of hopeless despair. She knew it, but it made her pity him no more. The thought of him, sleeping within a mere yard or two of her, through a couple of frail thicknesses of bricks and mortar, filled her with horror and repugnance. All the night through his cough had come to her at intervals, telling of that one undesirable companion of her sleeplessness. She was being left to him. Like a shadow now he would dog her steps. And with the instinctive fear that he would finally overcome her, in spite of all, that she would drift powerlessly to him, for lack of anchor to hold her firm, or impulse to move, she shuddered tears into her pillow, and clenched the coverlet with tightened fingers.

For there was only one man in the world for her, and he was going. She loved him; she loved him; she loved him. She knew that she was not for him or he for her; that he was above her on the ladder of life, treading cruelly upon her fingers, as it were, without knowing it, and she too proud to cry out; that this love of hers could never be consummated. But she loved him for all that; drove the sharp knowledge of it into her shrinking soul with the vindictive pleasure of a spur.

She knew now, now that he was going and it was ended, that she loved him with all the love of which her soul was capable. Would he have had to plead at her skirts ... as the schoolmaster had pleaded? No, no, no! She knew it. She would have kept him waiting no longer at the door of her heart than at the door of the Post Office itself. Had he just come to her and looked at her, and said "Pam" ... oh, she would have known. She would have known and gone into his open arms without shame, like a bird to the nest. But she was not for him; never had been; never would be. She had no anger against him because she was smitten. He was above all anger. She had no silly impulses of passion to declare herself deceived; no reproaches because he had never before pronounced himself a man pledged. Her own heart had been so pure that it saw no impurity in his. Even when he had put his arm about her and drawn her to him, and uttered her name and looked at her ... there was nothing in that to cast dishonor upon the other girl. It was only that he had detected her suffering, had understood that she was weeping and unhappy at his departure ... had put his arm about her to give her comfort, as though she 'd been a little child. It was a beautiful act of tenderness and compassion ... nothing more. Poor girl! poor girl! She was sick with the misery of love, that, not knowing whence came this sudden sorrow, multiplied causes without end; shames, ignominies, degradations. Even the scene with Emma Morland, that would have slipped away from her like water off the breast-feathers of a swan, had her heart been sound, was branded now into her remembrance with the sear of red-hot iron. Emma's look; her inquiries; the grasp of her hand; the drop of her voice; her anxious whisper--somehow, wretched girl that she was, she seemed in some fashion to have deserved them; to be guilty of some great unknown shame; to be a lost sister, sinking like sediment through the clear waters of life to its dregs, touching here and there as she descended. The day was full of terrors for her; the morning meeting with Emma and with the schoolmaster; the facing of her uncle and her aunt; their solicitude about a headache that had never been. More Ullbrig hypocrisy to wade through; more shame of lying and untruth.

From her bed she rose at length, a soulful picture of trouble; replaced the fallen pillow and drew up the blind. An echo of its sound of cord and creaking roller reached her faintly from elsewhere, with a muffled cough, and telling her that her own activity was being duplicated by the ever-vigilant shadow, struck pain across her mouth. The slide window was already part open, but she flung it to its extreme width, and resting her hands upon the white-painted sill, put out her head with red lips parted, and tried to air her bosom of its close, suffocating atmosphere of trouble that she had been breathing and rebreathing all through the hours of this night. Down below, under a thin attenuated mist, lay the little patchwork kitchen garden of potatoes and onions and peas and kidney beans, and the dingy vegetable-narrow frame, like a crazy quilt. And beyond that, away to her left, rolled out the fields in the face of the sun to Cliff Wrangham ... where he was. From her place she could distinguish the misty shadow, like a frost picture on a pane, that proclaimed Dixon's. How often, in the days that were gone, had she opened this casement and looked just so across the fields, and said to herself: "Will there be any letters for him this morning? ... and shall I see him?" But now she looked across and said: "I dare not see him. God send there may be no letter this morning." All the world looked strange to her. It seemed that her eyes, like the eyes of an infant, were not yet trained to correct the images formed upon her retina.

Poor girl! poor girl! She had been so happy once. So very happy with her six shillings a week, and no desires beyond the desire to be at peace with her neighbors and return good for evil.

At last she lighted her little oil stove, that had once been the supreme of her ambition throughout a month's saving, and set her can of bath-water to boil. Every morning she made the complete ablution of her body ... and in summer sometimes twice. In this respect, at least, there was nothing of the Ullbrig hypocrite about her. As Father Mostyn told the Spawer, and more than once, for Pam was a subject to his liking:

"Ha! different class; different class altogether. No mistaking it. You can trust her inside and out. Does n't dress herself first and then put a polish on her face with a piece of soapy flannel, taking care to rub the lather well in. Ha! that 's our Ullbrig way. Leave the neck for Sunday, and rub the soap well in.

"But, thank heaven, that 's not Pam's way. Can't mistake it. Has the instincts of the bath. Tubs herself like an officer of dragoons. No mistaking the derivation of that. It does n't come from the people; it's a pure blood inheritance; a military strain. She keeps her body as clean as her mind. You could put her in a duchess's bed, and her grace need n't be frightened of going in alongside of her. Ha! beautiful, beautiful! the grace of cleanliness that is next to godliness. Her body would almost get her into heaven."

And indeed, St. Peter is scarcely the man I take him for if he would n't.

Leighton's Psyche unwound herself from long veils of diaphanous drapery on the brink of a marble bath, and immersed herself in azure water without soap--so far as the artist indicates in the picture. Pam's setting was a big, round, sponge bath, scrupulously enamelled white by her own hand; she did not stand pensive by its side, as though wondering whether to-morrow or the day after would do as well; she unwound herself from no sensuous mists of lawn; she held an active-service towel in her hand, rough like a tiger's tongue, and in place of the diaphanous draperies the steam from the hot water rolled and curled and licked about her lovingly as she poured it into the bath, and tried it with fingertips of no indecision--but she was Psyche for all that. Her body was as sleek and supple as the picture Psyche; her flesh, where the sun had not browned, was as white as alabaster and as sound as a young apple; her limbs as shapely as any that Leighton's brush could have given her. When she stood up, with her firm, round bosom thrown out, and dipping the big Turkey sponge into the wash-basin of cold water, pressed it to her with both hands as though she were hugging the desire of her heart, while the water slid down her snowy torso, tinged with warm glow of pink now, like marble, and ran, still clinging about her limbs and body, to her feet; and dipped again, and again pressed, and again and still again, till the water at her service was exhausted, she was the best, most beautiful type of English girl; unforced in growth, but developed gradually in pure air and pure thought; not one member of her corporeal republic in advance of the other, or of herself; all of them, indeed, reserved in their development rather than in advance of it, but awaiting only the ripening. The beautiful picture of a girl on the threshold of womanhood, and waiting in all chastity to be called, without any indecorous rush to be in advance of the summons. Ah, girls, girls, girls! Always anxious to be women. Do not struggle so inordinately to be ripe for the market. Do you think man is such a poor judge that he does not know the merits of green fruit, or so witless that he does not know the dangers of the ripe? Keep your thoughts and bodies green, like oranges for shipment, for indeed you are perishable fruit.

The stimulus of the bath restored to some extent the freshness of the girl's mind, and gave to her sorrow a cleanly, less bedraggled emotion. From her eyes she swilled away all traces of the night's tears. Thank Heaven, she renovated very easily; a porcelain girl could not have ceded the dust of trouble more completely. She showed no redness about the lashes; no swelling of the lids; no dark hollows above the cheek-bone. Her flesh had not sickened in the least. A little press of the fingertip on its plumpness, and lo! it sprang back alive and responsive, like a cushion, with a little pink blush at the salutation; it did not respond with doughy sluggishness. Her lips had lost none of their fire of ruby; they had not consumed at all to grey ash; there was no dryness to show how great the flame had been, no withering like the dried leaf of a rose. Moist and elastic they looked as ever; the beautiful downward pull about their corners--as though an invisible Cupid were trying hard to bend this bow of his--might be more divinely accentuated, but that would only be to an acute observer who, holding the secret of the girl's sorrow as we do, searched keenly upon her face for the outward signs of it. Her cheeks were still as smooth and creaseless as ivory; her brow like a tablet on which nothing evil could ever be written. The same old Pam she looked and seemed to everybody but herself. Ah, if only one's mind would wash like one's body--what blissful sinners we could be.

And with the strangely awakened desire for cleanliness, the feverish thirst of a mind to counteract by outward purity its inward contamination, the desire even to change all the old garments of yesterday's turpitude, to invest herself in a new atmosphere, to give herself a new mind and a new body and a new environment, if she might, she drew on her legs black cotton-silk stockings of the sort she wore on Sundays; buckled them with the best pretty blue silk garters of her own making (Emma had a pair like these too), clad herself in linen of snowy white, unfolded from her neat store in drawer and cupboard; and hid all this dazzling envelopment under a pretty pale print frock that could have stood up of its own cleanliness--cool and fresh and rigid as an iceberg. And round her throat she clipped a snowy collar, and tied it with a crimson bow of silk. To be cool and clean, and be conscious of it. Let the mind burn, if it will, so long as the body does not reproach us.

Thus she was clad at last, and came forth to face the day, diffusing little wafts of cool print and white linen at every movement of her body; little breaths, fresh and unperfumed, smelling of nothing but young girlhood and cleanliness, that the nostril curled gratefully to inhale and retain, as reviving to the spirit as puffs of breeze blown into some burning valley from snow-clad mountains.

Slowly the early hours of the day wore on, and shaped themselves, outwardly at least, to the semblance of all other days that had gone before. Days in Ullbrig are as alike as pennies. This might have been yesterday, or a day out of last week, or a day out of last year. Only the change in oneself and one's outlook told of the relentless passage of time. They sat at breakfast in the second kitchen, this strange assortment of table company. The girl, like a star plucked from heaven, cleansed with the dew, and exhaling the freshness of skies and dawn; the postmaster, with his genial honest face of shrewd stupidity, brown as snuff and wrinkled like morocco leather, who cut bread with his knife and thumb and shoved it home with the haft, making a pouch of one cheek while he talked out of a corner of the other; who stirred his cup with the noise of a grindstone, and looped his thumb round his spoon while he drank to prevent its slipping down his throat. Mrs. Morland, with her relaxed face of maternal good-nature, like a well-buttered muffin, who looked as though she lacked the energy for long-sustained anger, which, in truth, she did. The vigilant Emma, sitting bolt-upright, as a sort of human cruet, vinegary and peppery--whose acidulated conversation almost lent the zest of pickles to the meal. And last of all the schoolmaster, peering ruminatively--not to say furtively--into his plate as though it were a book he pored over. When he masticated there were muscles that worked in his temples and imparted an air of grave, cerebral activity. His cough troubled him this morning, and his face bore the haggard evidences of sleeplessness.

No word of allusion to last night's matter passed between these two, but the constrained silence of each towards the other was like a finger laid inexorably upon this page of their past. He was present when the postmaster inquired of Pam about her headache, but recorded no expression of sympathy. Perhaps Pam's crimson blush deterred him; but he lingered, brushing his hat in the passage before departing for school, and when Pam happened to make a journey into the front parlor he interposed himself by the door against her return. Pam finding him there, still brushing his hat as though he were an automatic hat-brusher, stopped in the doorway coming out, and stood before him without speaking--not angrily or resentfully or reproachfully--but decidedly with the unhappiness of awakened remembrance upon her downcast face and trembling lip.

"I only wanted..." he began, in a low voice, almost inaudible, "... to tell you. Last night I--I said things to you ... that perhaps I ought n't to have said. I can't remember now exactly what I did say, but I 'm ... I 'm very sorry I said anything."

Pam told him it did n't matter the least bit. He was n't, please, to trouble.

"I did it for the best," he explained, "... at the time."

Pam said ... she was sure he did. He was n't, please, to think about it. It appeared, however, the only thing he was capable of thinking about. He seemed to have a difficulty in tearing himself away from it; brushing his hat the while. It is fortunate school started when it did, or he would have worn all the remaining nap off.

"Will you please try ... and forget what I said to you ... and forgive me?"

Pam said ... she had forgotten already. A shade crossed over his face to think that she should so soon have forgotten words that had been so vital to him at the time, but the forgiveness that accompanied it relieved the momentary disquietude.

"I hope..." he suggested--and in the pauses he brushed his hat fiercely--"... that it will make ... no difference to us. I hope we shall be ... as we ... as we were before."

Pam hoped so too, an invalid hope that walked slowly, and touched the walls of silence for support as it went.

"Noo," said the postmaster triumphantly, in the clean little kitchen, holding up a hand to enjoin attention, and jerking his thumb violently in the direction of the parlor door, whence the brushing of the hat and the low murmur of voices could plainly be heard. "What did ah tell ye? There they are agen, whisperin' an' mummelin'. As soon as ivver 'e got agate wi' 'is 'at i' passage Pam started to be after 'im."

"Sh! Be still wi' ye, then," said Miss Morland, going nearer to the door. "Div ye want to mek 'em think we 're listenin' tiv 'em?"

But even while she spoke the sound of the hat-brush ceased, and the subsequent shutting of the front door announced that the schoolmaster had departed to his duties--having told Pam that after this morning these duties would be at an end until harvest was over.

*CHAPTER XXIII*

Half an hour later the mail cart rattled up before the two-fold Governmental door over the big round cobbles, and the fiery figure of James Maskill, red and shining like a new-boiled lobster, fresh from his sun-bath, invaded the Post Office, blowing the sweat off his mouth on to the floor in a fierce "Bf-f-f!" with a shake of the head, and slammed the letter-bag on to the counter in a strenuous but not aggressive greeting.

"Noo," he said to the postmaster, mopping his face at him with a red handkerchief, and "Noo," again to Pam, mopping the inside of his cap. "Mah wod! Bud it 's gannin' to be warm to-day, before it's done."

"Will you have a drink, James?" Pam asked him.

At the sight of that ominous bag, so full of deadly inertness and possibility, her heart had thumped her like a stone in a box. Yes or no; yes or no; yes or no?

"What of?" James asked her straightway.

"Of ... of ... what would you like?"

"Nay ... 'appen ah 'm best wi'oot," James decided, a great mantle of modesty falling over him at this suggestion of choice.

"Not if you want one, you 're not," Pam said.

Her fingers were burning, and her heart was dreading the opening of the bag. Was there? Was n't there? Was there? Was n't there? She put her hand to her side again. James only thought she slackened the grip of her belt.

"Ah could do wi' un," he admitted reluctantly, "so far as that gans."

"Milk ... would you like?" Pam suggested.

"Nay ... ah mun't mix 'em," he declared oracularly, and licked his parched lips with a smack of apprehension.

"Mix what?" Pam asked.

"Ah 've 'ad one ... o' t' road," he explained. "Bud 'appen yon barril 's thruff by noo. She wor drawin' a bit thick last time ye asked me."

"Ye 're best wi'oot, Jaames Maskill," came the voice of Emma Morland, from the interior of the Post Office, "... this time o' mornin'."

"Ay, ah think ah 'm, mebbe," said the postman, plunging hands into his pockets and screwing up his mouth for a broken-hearted whistle.

"Gie 'im a glass o' lemonade," said the voice again. "'E can 'ave that an' welcome."

"Will you have a glass of lemonade?" asked Pam.

"Ay, ah 'm willin', if it suits ye," the postman acknowledged.

A hand appeared at the inner door holding a lemonade bottle and a thick tumbler (the latter looking as though it had once held marmalade in Fussitter's window), and a second hand, when Pam had possessed herself of these, held forth a boxwood lemonade opener.

The postman drew forth the effervescing liquid thirstily into his profounds, with his red chin mounting up step by step as though it were going upstairs, and a great fizzling sound from within as if he were a red-hot man, and let the glass rest on inverted end upon his lips for a space, to make sure it had yielded its last drop, and set it down on the counter with a great breathed "Ah!" of appreciation, holding his mouth open while the sparkles needled his inside.

"Noo let 's away," he said, "... or we s'll be 'avin' old Tankard prawtestin' us to Goovinment agen."

He said this because Pam had already opened the bag and was sorting the letters with quick, nervous fingers. Those for James Maskill's district went to the right hand of her; those for her own to the left. Her heart began to beat furiously. Now the impulse seized her to spread out all these letters over the counter and to furrow with both hands among them for the letter she feared to find. She knew by an instinct so strong that she never for a moment questioned it, what characteristics the fatal letter would possess. In her mind's eye she saw, with such clearness that her actual eye could scarcely add aught to the confirmation, the thin foreign envelope, the green stamps, the familiar superscription. She went cold and she went hot. Her ears burned, and there were strange noises opening inside them like whistles and hummings, as though in protest to the insupportable outer silence, the imperturbable calm of the Post Office. But the postman was watching her, and the postmaster from his high deal stool. It seemed as though they were all three silently concentrated upon the appearance of that fatal missive. Her emotions hastened, delayed, evaded, shuffled, ceased; but before these two onlookers her fingers went on regularly as clockwork.

Right, left. Right, right, right.

Left, left.

Right....

Left....

James Maskill, watching her, thought she hesitated there for an almost inappreciable moment, as though she had detected her fingers in blundering, and expected to see her transfer the letter from her own pile to his. But she had not blundered. No, no; she had not blundered. The distribution of the envelopes went on again apace, as though she were dealing hands from Fate's pack. Left, right; left, right; left, left, left. She allotted the last letter, and pushed James Maskill's budget towards him across the counter with a heroic smile, enough to make his eyes water. It was the smile such as a dying martyr might bequeath to those she loved, and by whom she had been loved. All was death and the coldness of it underneath, but at times like these death, coming from within, drives out the soul from its earthly tenement, and as it lingers on the threshold of the flesh before departing, the flesh is glorified. Many smiles had Pam given the postman in his time ... but this one clung to him--so far as anything seemed to him--that she might almost love him. That smile accompanied James Maskill throughout his morning's round. Ullbrig, looking beneath its blinds and through its muslin curtains, and out of the cool, gauze-protected windows of its dairies at the toiling figure of the postman--hot, perspiring, and dusty--could have little imagined that he was the carnal receptacle of a smile; that he held Pam's last look enclosed in his secretive body as though it had been the precious pearl and he the rugged oyster. But so it was. He scarcely noticed the shining of the outer sun, to such extent did the internal brightness light him.

And meanwhile, while James Maskill fed his heart upon that one smile and thought what a treasury of bliss it would mean to possess the possessor of it, the possessor walked along, a miserable bankrupt of happiness. Scarcely another smile remained to her. She had given him that one, but it was about her very last. Under the broad brown strap of her letter-bag she strode, with her lips locked and her soul as far away from her eyes as though the body were a house in the hands of the bailiffs; the key elsewhere; the occupants dispersed. For all the sun beat upon the red poppies in her hat till the straw cracked again and planted burning kisses on her neck, she was almost cold, from her feet in their black cotton-silk stockings upward. Once or twice even, she could have shivered for a thought. And the burden of the bag! Strange that one letter should make such a difference.

All about her the harvest was in full swing; the reapers whirling from seen and unseen quarters like the chirruping of grasshoppers. The morning's mist was quite absorbed; the scene was as clear and detailed as one of those colored Swiss photographs, with a blue sky, showing perhaps here and there a little buoyant white cloud floating cool and motionless in it, like ice in wine. Towards Garthston way the moving sails of the self-binder beat the air above the hedges. Half a dozen fields distant a pair of red braces, crossed over a calico shirt, struck out clear and distinct as though the whole formed a banner. Now and again she heard "Helloes," and looking, saw remote figures hailing her through their trumpeted hands. When she raised her own hand in response they made semaphores with the twisted bands of straw or shook rakes in the blue air. It was not many harvest fields that would have liked Pam to pass along the road without noticing them. From their side of the picture they saw the scarlet poppies dancing lightheartedly on their errand, and took the friendly uplifting of the girl's arm for token of the smile they never doubted would be there. If they could but have seen the smile of their blissful imagination at close quarters--a mere strained drawing back of the lips--as significant of pain as of pleasure, it would have furnished them with ample material for their harvest-field converse.

Ah, yes. She was very sick and wretched and unhappy. All the natural spring was out of her step. She wanted to walk flat-footed, with both her hands hanging and her chin down; but by sheer resolve she held her head high, and broke the dull concussion of her step with that lissom responsiveness of toe which was now the vanished inheritance of her happiness. She did not want to meet him ... this morning. She did not feel equal to it. She prayed, as she walked, that she might have this one good favor bestowed upon her in her trouble: the blessed privilege of avoiding him. Without the culminating straw to her sorrow, the letter in her bag, she could have met him ... perhaps ... with some amount of courage and confidence. But now ... to have to be the bearer of what she bore ... and repeat all the history of her misery in this summarised form; to give him the letter ... be witness while he read it even; hear him tell her definitely that he must go ... that all was over! Oh, no, no, no! It was too much for her to sustain. And she did n't want to break down before him again. She did n't want to degrade herself in his sight. It was one thing to shed tears at a sudden intelligence ... but it was another to be always shedding them. If she showed tears again ... he would suspect her. Had he been another girl she could have wept her weep out upon his shoulder. That was admissible between girls. But because he was a man ... she could not weep. There were no friendships possible between men and women; it was love or nothing. She must just let her heart break--if only it would--in silence and solitude.

All in thinking upon her trouble, her step, accommodating itself spontaneously to the mental retardation of her progress, grew slower and slower. The nearer she came to Cliff Wrangham, the more time she needed to prepare herself. If possible she must try and slip round through the Dixon's paddock, cut across the stackgarth, and leave the letter with one of the twins--if only she could come upon them--without being seen. They would be sure to be somewhere about. Then she tested her stratagem by all sorts of contingencies. Suppose Miss Bates came upon her instead, and asked her to wait ... for any letters in return. Suppose ... he was out in the lane ... waiting anxiously for the very letter she so feared delivering. She might leave it at Stamway's, and ask Stamway's if they 'd let Arthur drop across the fields with it ... as she was in a hurry to get back. And she would give Arthur a penny.

And now her step was slowed almost to a standstill. George Middleway even could have run her down. All the activity was up above; there was none left for her legs. Already she was past the halfway house in the little elbow of road before you get first sight of Stamway's. It is a part enclosed; except from the immediate fields, which were untenanted, she could n't be seen here in the pursuit of wasting Government time. The next turn would bring her into sight again; she would be under the eyes of Stamway's; Dixon's would be able to follow her progress henceforward, all but a yard here or a yard there, to the paddock stile. Before she came into public view again ... she ought to think; she ought to make sure. And one cannot think, standing erect in the roadway like a scarecrow. It looks suspicious, even to the suspicious eye of self--that at these times suspects everything. Instinctively she drew into the shelter of a hospitable gateway. There, at least, she could profess for her own satisfaction that she had succumbed to the midday lassitude; was listening to the music of the reapers, with her arm over the rail and her foot on one of the lower bars.

Was the past a dream? ... or the present? Had the Spawer ever been? ... or was he ever going? Which was easier to realise? The joyousness of then or the misery of now? Should she wake up to discover that all her unhappiness was a nightmare, that there was no question of the Spawer's going, no dread of a letter? She dipped her hand, almost unconsciously, into the bag to see if, perchance, the whole affair was an unsubstantial fabric of fancy.

Ah, no! No fancy; no fancy. She had not wakened yet. There were the two letters at the bottom of the bag; the one for Stamway, the other ... it came out with her hand. She had not wilfully drawn it, but it seemed to cling to her fingers. Oh yes, how well she knew its motley of stamps and postmarks; how well the superscription in that familiar feminine hand. She held it before her eyes, and gazed at the writing as though she would have wrested the invisible scribe out of it; called up the astral body of the girl who, in these shapely lines, and all innocently and unknowingly, had dealt her happiness such an irreparable blow. Who was she? Where did she live? When, where, and how had he met her? Did she love music? Had he taught her? Had he taught her French? Was she beautiful? Ah, she was sure to be. And a lady. That would be a fashionable way of affixing the stamps. And young. Rich too, perhaps. She must be, for poor people could not afford to spend long holidays in foreign places like this. Assuredly the writer of these words did not tramp the country roads with a bag over her shoulder for six shillings a week.

Something white and moving grew into the corner of her unconscious eye as she gazed in absorption upon the fatal envelope--a cow or a horse or a sheep or a cloud, over the hedge line.

But no; it was not a cow. It was too erect for a cow; too tall for a sheep; too progressive for a cloud. There was a patch of color about it too, somewhere. Cows did not wear ribbons, or sheep or clouds.

It was a figure; the figure of a man; a man in white; a man in flannels--the Spawer.

All at once her dormant consciousness awoke with a start to his imminence, as though her eye had been giving no warning of his approach all this while. She turned round, and a great spreading sickness of guilt took hold of her. Her blood seemed rushing all ways, like an anthill in confusion. The hand with the letter dropped suddenly, as though it were a wounded wing. It was the right hand that held it now, and the bag was on her left side. Had he seen her? Could she pass it into the bag without notice. He was horribly near ... and looking at her. Her heart pitched downward like a foundering vessel into the trough of her fear.

Into the pocket at the back of her her guilty hand crept, trembling and craven, and lay there, in its thief's refuge, burning unbearably like the firebrand of her infamy.

*CHAPTER XXIV*

The hot sunlight about the Post Office was savory with the smell of Yorkshire pudding--you might have almost imagined that it was the house itself a-cooking--when Pam returned, beneath the sling of the empty letter-bag.

On other mornings she would take her way in through the two-fold Governmental door; announce her arrival in musical pleasantry to the postmaster in his little shoemakery; hang up the flabby letter-bag on its peg behind the counter; pop in upon Emma Morland, if she were at work in the trying-on room, to commend her diligence or express surprise at the amount of the work achieved, or ask in what way she could be of assistance; give a look into the little clean kitchen to feel the pulse of the oven, and proffer herself for some kind service to her aunt-by-courtesy, as red as boiled beetroot, and fitting her clothes as tightly as if she 'd been a bladder set before the hot grate. But this morning the girl made no parade of arrival. She drew nearer to the house by the shadow of its walls, and let herself meekly in through the spick-and-span household door--white painted, with fashionable brass knob and knocker--that gives entrance between the twelve-paned parlor window beyond the scraper and the smaller eight-paned window of Miss Morland's trying-on room, whose austere starched curtains (drawn in primly at the pit of the stomachs with pink sashes to reveal the polished oak cover of the sewing-machine, and sundry dress fabrics in course of construction, casually displayed) always proclaimed any particularly sacred rite of disrobement proceeding within its sanctuary by being discreetly pinned.

Whereat, though man's religious fibres might be stirred to their utmost, it was useless his stopping to spell out the familiar capitals of Emma's card with all the earnestness of the anxious (and short-sighted) inquirer after Truth.

Up to her bedroom she stole, a soft-toed figure, by the best Sunday staircase, with white holland over the carpet. If she were dead they would bring her down this staircase in her coffin. She wished she were dead. She was dead in all but the flesh--and in truth she looked but the phantom of her former self--but the ghost of the girl that had gone out this morning. All the color was struck out of her blanched cheeks as though a hand had smitten them white, and no blood returned to reproach the blow. Her eyes were fixed in front of her whichever way she walked; it seemed something horrible had been stamped upon them and set over them for seal. Her lips were hard and rigid; wax-work lips, artificially colored, upon a wax-work mouth. It looked as if such a mouth could never open in speech; it was a mold, a cast, struck off the face of grief. Slowly, but very surely, the old Pam was being squeezed out of her bodily habitation. As a house in the hands of new tenantry loses its old outward characteristics and takes on new features of blinds and curtains and window-palms, so this body of Pam's in the hands of its new possessor was beginning gradually to display evidences of the invisible occupant that, hidden behind its walls, wrung fingers and wept, and spent its moments in the torturing austerities of self-examination and penance.

... Once in her bedroom, the hardness fell off the girl's face as though it had been stucco; the hidden occupant came to her trembling lips, looked out of her eyes, gazed forth upon the outer world, as an escaped prisoner might, full of horror of his position, and dreading every moment the summons that should announce his discovery. But there were no tears this time. Tears are but the petty cash of woman's trouble account; the noisy silver and copper, which make a great jingle, are parted with and never missed. Pam's trouble was no longer in silver and copper, not in gold even. It was in silent bank-notes. All the tears in the world could not liquidate such a liability. One might as well attempt to compound with a handful of irate creditors out of the loose coin at the bottom of one's pocket. Besides, it was not sorrow now, it was horror. In trouble women weep; but in horror they stare with open eyes, for fear the thing dreaded may come upon them when they are unaware. So children, who rain tears at a dog by day, will lie abed silent at night, with their great, dry eyes fixed upon the darkness, and fear to cry or close them. Tears, scalding tears, were all about the hot lashes of the girl's eyes; but into her eyes themselves they did not enter. Like a thief she had stolen round her own door; like a thief she pressed it to, with a hand over its sneck, and shot the little catch under the lock; like a thief she listened--she, who had feared nothing before but herself and her own conscience; feared everything now.

The big grandfather's clock downstairs went "Br-r-r-r-r!" It was a way he had; he meant nothing by it; but it sent the girl's hand to her bosom this morning as though she had heard in the sound the announcement of her whereabouts to the world at large. Now she strained her ears for the sounds of feet, the calling of her own name, the approach of pursuers ... but there came none. Only down below were audible the muffled intermittent click click click of Emma's industrious machine; the tapping of the shoemaker's hammer; the sound of the little kitchen poker thrust energetically through the bars of the grate to rouse the sleepy fire to its duty by Mrs. Morland; the clash of saucepan lids and the jangle of a pail. Satisfied that her entrance had been unobserved, and that the clock's warning had been in vain, she unslung the post-bag from her shoulder and hung it over the foot of the bed; removed her hat of red poppies, and laid it on the chest of drawers.

What had she come for? For a moment even she herself seemed scarcely to know, standing by the bedside with dangling head as though she had been some wild driven creature fleeing for refuge, of which now, in possession, she knew not to make what use. Then as she stood, her right hand crept round to the back of her, found the entrance to her pocket, burrowed its way out of sight into its depths like a mole; delved there for a while, lay still, and came forth into the open, dragging its prize--something white and square and unsubstantial, that crackled resentfully under the holding. An envelope; a letter.

In the stillness of death the girl held this helpless prey of her fingers under gaze and stared at it. She did not read. It was no act of curiosity. It was the horror-struck stare of a face that had been seeking confirmation of its guilt and found it. She did not look at details of writing or of the address; she fastened her great eyes upon the thing in gross--the four inches by three of her everlasting turpitude. She had not given it to him. Into her pocket it had gone; in her pocket it had stayed. She had stolen it. She was a thief; a thief; a thief!

On her soft, clean bed she threw herself and lay face downwards, without a tear. In her grief, as in everything else that she did, she was beautiful. Her light dress of print gathered under her and wound about her body as she rolled, and outlined the supple firmness of her figure with something of gusto in the task. In abandonment there seemed no bones in it; it was supple as a salmon; as lissom as a wand cf green lancewood. Backward or forward, this way, that way, it looked as though you might have bent it and broken nothing--not even its heart. Her ankles, dear indices to a fascinating volume, so sleek and tight and flexible, lost nothing by their encasement in black cotton-silk; into the little soft leather Sunday shoes her feet fitted like a hand into a glove; press your thumb and finger anywhere and the leather would gently resist you. Poor little shoes, that had walked so happily in their time, how very still and lifeless they lay now, side by side on the white counterpane, with their soles still fresh and lemon-colored, turned pathetically towards the foot-rail. This burden at least is too heavy for you, little patient smugglers. And little arms that had swung so blithely; how resistless you are now. Many lovers have sought to be enfolded within them in their time, but you have repulsed them all. Now is come a lover whom you cannot repulse. They shall clasp him, unresisting, and he shall enter them. Shame is your lover. He has been in your waking dreams all this night past, seen dimly and distorted. Now you have him face to face. Lie still in his arms and be mute before the hot caress of his kisses. Your Gingers and your James Maskills, your doctors, your parsons, your schoolmasters, your Jevons, and your Steggisons have sought you in the flesh, but this lover has found you through the spirit. Now that the spirit is surrendered the flesh lies prone enough.

Poor beautiful flesh. Even Shame's kisses cannot corrupt the beauty of it. In this moment of its weakness and surrender, if the Spawer could but be witness of you, it is probable (only you do not know it) that your defeat would gain you the victory. For the weakness of a woman is her strength, and to see beauty so overthrown, by a lover less relenting than himself, rouses a man's best instincts of honor and protecting chivalry.

But the Spawer is three good miles away, and cannot enter damsels' bedrooms as the sun does. Perhaps, as human nature is constituted, it is well. If you cried on him he could not hear you, and with that label of your guilt between your fingers, though you knew he could hear you, you dared not cry.

Poor child! Poor child! So young, so beautiful, and so wicked! So dreadfully, horribly wicked!

To say that she thought would be to convey a wrong impression of her state. Thought, like her eyes, was wide open, but it did not think--any more than her eyes saw. It stared--stared fixedly, without blinking, at the consciousness of her great wickedness.

Dreadful images passed over the darkened curtain of life, like the pictures of a magic-lantern.

In Sproutgreen a poor girl had taken some clothes that did not belong to her. Only a bodice (very much worn), an old skirt, a vest or two (she was badly off for vests), and some stockings. She had not meant to take them, she said ... but all the same she had taken them, and they had sent her to prison.

That picture showed on Pam's screen too.

She had not meant to take it. No, no; but she had taken it. Why should n't she be sent to prison? Why should the one poor girl be made to suffer and she go free?

A man in Hunmouth had stolen a leg of mutton from a butcher's shop when the butcher's back was all but turned. If he 'd only waited a moment longer or set off a moment sooner all would have been well. But his wife was starving and he was in a hurry. He wanted the mutton ... it was noble of him to risk himself for a dying wife. But the law recognises no nobility in theft, and sent him to prison.

That picture showed on Pam's mind too.

She was n't starving; there was no excuse for her, even of pity. She had stolen something she did n't want. She was a thief, unworthy to receive the weight of honest people's eyes. Looks now, the lightest of them, smiles and glances, were all insufferable burdens deposited upon the bowed shoulders of her shame.

Poor girl! poor, unhappy girl! Wrong from first to last. Seeing the world upside down. Cast forth from the cool leafy oasis of hope into the burning desert of despair. If she could have taken but one peep into the man's heart the rain of blessed relief would have fallen in abundance; she would have kissed that dread letter for token of her forgiveness; would have risen, smiling in glory, like the sun through April clouds.

But she could not see. These two souls, surcharged with their vapors of unshed trouble, that only needed to come together to combine and pour forth all their misery in one great shower of gladness and rejoicing--these two souls lay asunder.

While the girl stared dumbly into the blackness of her pillow, the man gazed with the vacant stare of a harmless idiot over Dixon's first gate. If his state had been hopeless before, he told himself, it seemed doubly hopeless now.

To be sentimental by moonlight was one thing, but for a man ostensibly in the marriage-bespoke department to manoeuvre a wide-awake girl into the laneways of emotion was a very different thing indeed. All their yesterday's sentimentalism was so much trade discount knocked off their relations; he was at cost price now, and something under. The whole time of their interview this morning she was unmistakably trying to shake him off; had been inventing urgent reasons why she must be getting back; had n't a word to say for herself beyond transparent excuses to get away; could n't say what she was going to be doing this afternoon; could n't say what she was going to be doing to-night; could n't say whether she should see him to-morrow; could n't say, apparently, whether she 'd ever see him again; had almost torn herself away from him in the end. What was he to think? What was he to say? What was he to do?

He was a sick man now, and no mistake. His very internals tormented him, as though he were a storm-tossed, drifting ship, and he saw land and the girl receding from him hopelessly on the horizon. How to reach her? How to get back to her? How still to save himself?

Alas, during these moments of wounded love and pride, for the Other One!

*CHAPTER XXV*

In one swift headlong descent of crime Pam had suddenly arrived at the awful pitch of robbing Her Majesty's mail.

She had vague terrorised notions of the penal code and the shameful penalty of her crime, but her horror for what the world would inflict upon her, to ease its conscience of the various offences it commits itself, was exceeded by the horror with which self regarded self. And she had horror, too, of the unutterable horror that would prevail in this house, so still and peaceful at present, supposing her crime were brought home to her and exposed. She saw the awe-struck face of the postmaster, sitting with his mouth open and empty of words under the incredible calamity of her shame; she saw Emma Morland looking at her, part in anger, part in unbelief, part in compassion; she saw James Maskill obstinately refusing to meet her eye, and pretending to whistle in shocked abstraction; she saw her one act extended and dramatised to its very close at Sproutgreen Court-house, as clearly as though her soul were a theater, luridly lighted, and she were sitting in the pit ... a horrified, helpless, untearful spectator of her own downfall.

All suddenly the course of the drama was disturbed. There was a sound of doors downstairs; voices mixed in question and answer. She held her breath and listened. Her heart gave a great bump and seemed to stop altogether. So vivid was her conception of her crime that her mind accepted these noises as indisputable notification of its detection. All the world was astir about the stolen letter. The policeman was there; the machinery of the law was in motion. They were come to take her. They would all be waiting for her below. She saw them in a blinding group, with the stragglers beyond, about the Post Office door; children flattening their noses and sticking their tongues grotesquely against the panes for a sight inside; licking their fingers and drawing slimy tracks over the glass. And then she heard her name uttered--that hateful name that was become now as a second word for sin. The sound of it sent a shudder through her to the soles of her lemon-colored shoes.

"Pam...." It was Emma Morland's voice that called her. "Pam! Are ye there?"

Instinctively she clutched the tell-tale letter in her hand and scrambled off the bed. Her first thought was for the little dressing-table. She pulled up the looking-glass (ah, that was no liar); rubbed her cheeks with her hands to try and soften their haggardness; smoothed her hair rapidly; shook out her skirts, and passed on trembling legs to the door. Her name met her a second time as she opened it, from a few steps further up the stairs, and more urgently uttered.

"Pam! ... Are ye there?"

Her mouth was dry; her lips felt cracked like crust; her tongue a piece of red flannel, but her voice might have been less unsteady--as it might also have been louder--when she answered.

"I 'm here," she said, and with an effort to divert suspicion and appear unconcerned; "... do you want me, Emma?"

A guilty person would never ask: "... do you want me?" A guilty person would know too well, and not dare to risk the question. Don't you understand? Cunning, you see, was coming to her help--now that she was enlisted in the devil's own army. When the crime is once committed, when we have taken the infernal shilling and the devil is sure of us, he does not stint his soldiers with the armament of craft.

"Did n't ye 'ear me callin' of ye?" Miss Morland inquired, with some sharpness of reproof at having been kept at the occupation.

"... I can't have done," said Pam. "... Have you been calling long?"

"Ah 've been callin' loud enough, onny road," Miss Morland protested. "What 's gotten ye upstairs?"

Pam's fingers tightened their hold of the letter in her pocket.

"... I 've been..."--she cast a beseeching look around the room for inspiration; the devil furnished her at once--"washing myself."

"Goodness wi' ye! En't ye washed yersen once this mornin'?"

"I 've been ... having another. It 's so hot outside."

"Ye mud be a mucky un bi t' way ye stan' i' need o' soap an' watter. Ye do nowt else, a think. Come down wi' ye noo an' set dinner things, will ye? It 's about time."

Only that! Not detection; not discovery and shame. Only to lay the dinner things. And she had been paying for that moment with all the horror and heart-burning and trembling of knees for the real shame itself. What prodigality of terror! What an outrageous price to pay, for a mere worthless alarm!

Now it seemed to her her body was turned to glass. Every thought within her she felt must be visible through its transparent covering, as though she had been but a shop-window for the display of her delinquencies. Down at the bottom of her pocket, smothered beneath her handkerchief, and her hand most frequently over that, lay the object of her crime. She dared not turn her back for long lest they should see it through her clothing. If it had been buried under the red flags of the kitchen their eyes would have been drawn to it and found it. They had lynx eyes, of a sudden, all of them. They pricked her through and through with strange test-glances, as though they were trying the flesh of a pigeon with a fork. When she put her hand to her pocket to reassure herself, at some horrid suspicion, that the letter was still there ... their eyes taxed the action and charged her at once, seeming to say: "Ah! ... what 's that? Did something crinkle?"

Even the handkerchief, in which she had placed her trust to hold down and choke the evidence of her guilt, narrowly missed betraying her outright into the hands of her enemies. It was after dinner. They were all rising from the table, and for some reason, Pam could not say why--unless it was that she felt some concentrated look upon her from behind and wished to perform a trifling act of unconcern to divert suspicion--but all at once she found herself with the handkerchief in her hand, and heard, at the very moment that her own fear shot like a dart through her breast, the keen voice of Emma:

"See-ye; what's that ye 've dropped o' floor? A letter bi t' looks on it."

In a flash Pam spun round upon the white square upon the red tiles. The schoolmaster had already perceived it, and come forward to relieve her of the necessity for stooping; his hand was outstretched when she turned, but she almost flung herself in front of him and snatched the letter from under his fingers. It was a dreadful display of distrust and suspicion. Her breath came and went, between shame for her act and terror for the alternative, while she stood before him, thrusting the letter into the pocket at the back of her, with a face like a flaming scarlet poppy, and a breast rising and falling, as though he had been seeking to wrest the missive from her. As for Emma Morland, accustomed as she was growing to novel demonstrations of the girl's character, this present act so eclipsed all previous records, and ran so counter to everything that experience had ever taught her of Pam, that she gasped in audible amazement. The schoolmaster, on his side, awkwardly placed--as one whose undesired services seem to savor of meddlesomeness--flushed up to the high roots of his hair, and then slowly, very, very slowly, commenced to whiten all over till his face, his lips, his neck even seemed turned, like Lot's wife, into salt.

If Pam had but allowed him to return the letter, it is quite probable that he might have had the good feeling to raise it from the floor and hand it to her with his eyes upon hers, as a guarantee of good faith. On the other hand, it was equally probable that he might not. In any case, the risk would have been truly a heavy one to run. But now, though Pam had saved herself from open detection, it was only at the cost of a suspicion that henceforth would keep its wide eye upon her every action. Love is a terrible detective; it has no conscience; knows no more than a criminal to discern between right and wrong. Everything that it does it does for love. The things done are nothing. The thing done for is all. Back into Pam's pocket went the accursed germ of crime and misery which she must hug so closely--though she would have given her unhappy soul to be rid of it.

But there was no safety in her pocket now; all her confidence in a personal possession fled from her. Her hand seemed sewn into her dress, by its anxiety to keep assured of the letter's safety. For everything that she did with her right hand she did half a dozen with her left.

And even that tried to betray her.

"What 'a ye done at yersen?" Miss Morland asked her tartly, when she saw her collecting the glasses lamely off the table with the left hand, and the other one missing. "... 'A ye cutten yer finger?"

"No...."

Pain jerked it quickly into use and showed desperate activity with it. Also, she cast a fearful look over her elbow, lest she should see the condemnatory square of white lying on the floor at the back of her, blinking maliciously at her discomposure. The letter seemed, in her imagination, suddenly instinct with the diabolical desire to work her ruin. She could no longer trust it about her. Up to her room she betook herself at the first favorable opportunity--which was the first that Emma's back happened to be turned. In the low, long drawer of the wardrobe, deep beneath confidential articles of personal attirement, she buried it in the furthermost corner, as far as arm could reach. Then she squeezed the drawer to again noiselessly, and standing back, applied her gaze in terrible assiduity to see whether the wardrobe showed any outward and visible signs of having been tampered with for improper purposes. There was nothing suspicious that she could discover. The knobs spun wickedly, and winked at her in devilish confraternity:

"Aha, not a word. Trust us. We know; we know!"

The afternoon drew on with a humming and a droning, and a buzzing and a whirring, and a tick-tacking and a hammering, all mixed up sleepily together in thick sunlight, like the flies in Fussitter's golden syrup. The postmaster slept on his little bench in the shoemakery, with his head back against the wall, and his mouth open like the letter-box outside, and Ginger Gatheredge's left boot between his knees, sole upward, and a hammer in one hand and the other thrown out empty--with the sort of mute, supplicating gesture towards the inexorable that one associates with rent-day. Mrs. Morland had slipped out to Mrs. Fussitter's, and would be back in a minute--without committing herself to say which. Emma was in the trying-on room, with her mouth all pinned up; there must have been, at one moment, a dozen tucks in at least. The schoolmaster was in the second kitchen. Pam was in the first. She knew where he was; her ears were alert to every sound in the house, but she did not know that he was keeping guard over her with a terrible check of concentration and listening apprehension. She was frightened he might be going to seek a conversation with her, but she need have no fear of this had she only known. He was as frightened of such a meeting--for different reasons--as she. Suspicion was consuming him again in silence, like the old former flame of his love. He dared not trust himself to words; he could only listen. Only desired to listen and keep always near her. He trusted her no more than if she 'd been a declared pickpocket. Love without any foundation of faith is a terrible thing, and his love was a terrible thing. He had loved her before as he would have loved an angel; his own unworthiness alone had made him fear for the getting of her. Now he loved her no less--deeper, indeed--but it was the love for a beautiful and treacherous syren. His love was as unworthy as he believed hers to be. He knew not to what extent she would practise her deadly deceptions, and in holding himself prepared for any, his mind outstepped them all. He opened a book--it was a volume of Batty's hymns--and laid it on the table to be ready as an excuse, should any be needed. And there he sat, with the flat of his face strained towards the kitchen beyond, where he heard the girl astir.

For a while, so far as Pam was concerned, in her solitary occupancy of the kitchen, she was free from actual alarms. Only her mind troubled her; asking her how she was going to repair this great wrong that she had done--for she had no wilful intention of retaining the letter. All her mind was concentrated upon the hazy means of its safe delivery. All her fears were lest shame of discovery should fall upon her before she could make redress. And these fears were not groundless. The task of redress seemed more difficult as she looked at it. In the first place, the letter bore the date of its Hunmouth stamping conspicuously on its face. Had the Ullbrig office had the stamping of its own letters, how easy it would have been to re-stamp over the old postmark. But coming and going, all the letters were stamped in Hunmouth. Oh, why had n't Government trusted them with the stamping of their own? So much better it would have been--so much better. Yet since there was no possibility of altering the tell-tale postmark, what was to be done? If she took the letter as it was ... he might remark the date, remember having come upon her when she was reading something, remember having seen her put something hurriedly into her pocket, remember her confusion when he asked whether there was any letter for him ... piece it all together and learn that she 'd robbed him.

And till he got this letter ... he would stay at Cliff Wrangham.

And there might be other things in it besides.

Money, for instance. Notes that She wanted him to put into the bank for her. That made Pam feel very ill. Notes--bank-notes! Those would mean transportation ... or something, for life, would n't they? The kitchen felt of a sudden so small and hot and cell-like that she could bear it no longer. She slipped out feverishly into the garden. There, among the potatoes and cabbages she made a turn or two, but it was such an unusual thing for her to do, and she was so afraid lest its strangeness might set other eyes to industry concerning her altered state, that the fear that had driven her out drove her in again. Back she came from under the burning sun into the stewpot of a kitchen. And there, all at once, she heard a horrible sound from overhead that stunned her intelligence like a cruel box on the ears. The next moment she was racing up the little twisted staircase with the horrid stealth and the concentrated purpose of a tigress. To her bedroom she fled on swift, noiseless feet; crouched by the door for a moment to make sure, and prepare her spring, and pounced in terrible silence upon the curved figure of the postmaster's daughter, on her knees by the fatal drawer of the wardrobe.

*CHAPTER XXVI*

"What are you doing there?" she panted breathlessly.

"Lawks, lass." The figure of Miss Morland sprang upward like a startled Jack-in-the-box and caught at the open drawer to prevent an overbalancement on to her back. "What a start ye gied me, comin' in on a body like that. Y' ought to 'ad more sense. Ah thought ye wor far enough."

"You have ... no right here," Pam said, desperately trying to justify her entrance. "This is my room. You have no right in my room. What are you doing in that drawer? You ought to have ... asked my permission."

For a moment Miss Morland's face was a kaleidoscope of conflicting emotions. Her mind apparently was in such rapid progress that her words could n't descend, like passengers at the door of a railway carriage, until the train had sufficiently slowed up.

"Oh, mah wod!" she ejaculated, rising to her feet at length in rare display of dudgeon, and wiping the unworthy lint of Pam's carpet off her knees as though it were contamination. "Things is come tiv a pretty state when ah 've to ask ye whether ye 've ganned an' putten mah red petticawt i' your drawer by mistake. Mah wod, they 'ave an' all. Ye mud think a body wanted to rob ye. What 's come tiv ye?"

Even now, with that fatal drawer thrown open, and the signs of rummaging visible about the surface, Pam dared not retreat from her standpoint. (Oh, my Heaven! it was n't her standpoint at all. She had n't made it. Had n't wished it. Up till now Emma had had the run of this room unchallenged. But Pam was but a poor, unresisting tool in the hands of her terror.) She dared not give Emma permission to continue the search. She dared not say she was sorry. She dared not abate one jot or tittle of her loathsome simulated indignation. She could n't breathe until that drawer was safely shut.

"If you had asked me..." she began.

"Ah don't want to ask ye nowt," Miss Morland said contemptuously. "Ye tell me nowt bud lies."

Pam's lip quivered with fear and reproach. How much did Emma suspect? How much did she know? How much had she seen?

"You have no right ... to say that, I think, Emma," she protested.

It was less a protest than a tremulous feeler, to sound the depths of Emma's knowledge. But she quaked for results.

"No, ah en't," Miss Morland acquiesced, with the terrible force of agreement that means so much dissent. "Ah s'd think ye was just comin' upstairs to get yersen washed again, when ye dropped o' me."

"I will look for the petticoat ... if you wish," Pam offered humbly. "But I don't think it 's here. Which one did you say it was, Emma?"

"Ah did n't say it was onny un," Miss Morland declared, repudiating the olive branch. "Ah don't want ye to look for owt. Ah 'll do wi'oot petticawt sin' ah 'm not fit to be trusted. Ay, an' ye need n't trust me. Ah don't trust you. Ah know very well ye 're agate o' seummut ye 'd for shame to be fun' [found] out in. Where 's waiter ye washed i' this mornin' before dinner? An' 'oo's been liggin' [lying] o' t' bed? Cat, ah s'd think. Folks is n't blind if ye think they are.... Noo, get yersen washed agen. Ah 'm about tired o' ye."

At which Miss Morland slammed to the drawer peremptorily with her knee, and flounced past Pam in a fine show of injured pride and indignation. And Pam never questioned the justice of her wrath. Emma was right to be angry. Pam had treated her shamefully, shamefully, shamefully. Oh, never did she think in the hours of her happiness that she would ever have come to treat Emma like this. To suspect her; to approach upon her by stealth; to use harsh words to her; to offend her so needlessly and so cruelly.

All the same, as soon as the feet of the postmaster's daughter had departed downstairs, telling the tale of their indignation loudly to every step on the way and banging it into the door at the bottom, the girl dropped on her knees, opened the drawer anew, and commenced to examine the depth and nature of Emma's exploration. Heart, soul, and body, suspicion now was eating her up piecemeal. With the lapse of her own trust she trusted nobody. Carefully she turned up the articles one by one, to see how far signs of recent disturbance extended. Thank goodness, they were mainly at the top. She sent her wriggling right arm to that furthermost corner at the bottom of the drawer, and the letter was there; there (relief and reawakened misery) flat as she had laid it.

But this incident had shaken Pam's nerve. Her faith in the room was shattered, and in agony of spirit she cast her eyes about on all sides of her to decide where now she could best deposit this horrid possession. Thoughts of sewing it into a little flannel band and wearing it across her breast occurred to her. But all sorts of dreadful things might happen. She might fall; she might faint; some sudden accident might overtake her; she might drop down dead even, or dying; willing hands might tear open her dress-body and exhume this frightful secret from its shallow grave. To such an extent did she foresee disaster of this sort, that the mere wearing of the letter seemed a courting of it. It was like shaking her fist in the face of Providence.

And then of a sudden she bethought herself. In the front parlor downstairs was a little inlaid brass and mother-of-pearl writing-desk that Father Mostyn had given her. Once she had made regular use of it for such small writing as she had, but now never. It had become elevated from an article of use to an article of household adornment; one of those penates--ornamental fetiches, with which all rustic parlors abound. To open it almost was an act of profanity, except for Pam. Pam had one or two little treasures of a personal nature that she was guarding zealously, and the household law could be stretched a point to allow her a sight of these possessions from time to time, so long as she did not abuse the privilege. True, there was no key--but then, respect of sacred tradition was as good as any key. Nobody had ever looked into the desk but Pam since its sanctification. Why should they look now? Down to the front parlor she worked her way, disguising the directness of her journey with the cunningest side errands, doublings and confusings of her tracks.

It was but the work of a moment to open the desk, but quick as she was about it the door of the second kitchen, that led out into the passage, opened in the meanwhile, and she heard the schoolmaster emerge. There was no time to dwell upon the details of the letter's concealment. Between the two leaves of the desk she thrust it, pushed the desk back into its place, reinstated the china shepherdess on its polished top, and picking up the crystal letter-weight, with the vivid picture of Southport in colors beneath its great magnifying eye, engrossed herself in the examination of this--her scarlet neck and burning ears turned resolutely towards the doorway.

For some moments, standing silent, a statue of guilt surprised, with her heart turning somersaults inside her and her voice miles away had it been called upon--she almost believed that the schoolmaster had entered the parlor. It seemed she was conscious of his presence advancing behind her; could feel his eyes boring through and through her like live coal. So tense was her feeling, and so imperative the summons of that unseen gaze, that in sheer self-defence she was constrained to lay down the letter-weight and turn round quaveringly to meet her accuser.

But there was none to meet. The room was empty of any but herself. For all she knew, the whole circumstance--from the opening of the kitchen door to the schoolmaster's entrance--was a mere fabrication of her tortured nerves. And now she would have liked to bring forth the desk anew and do her hiding over again more thoroughly, but she dared not, lest she might be disturbed in real fact. Minutes she waited there, with her hand on her bosom, listening for the selection of a moment that should seem propitious. "Now," she kept urging herself; and "now," "now," "now!"

But whenever she extended an arm some warning voice within her cried: "Wait ... what was that?" At times it was but the creaking of her own corset; the straining of her leather belt; the rustle of her dress. But it always arrested her short of her intention; it always seemed that the house woke into movement the minute she sought to revise her work.

And last of all, when she had wasted enough favorable moments for the doing of her work twenty times over, she grew frightened that this continued propitiousness of circumstance was too good--like summer weather--to last. Every moment now must see its break-up and dissolution; every moment added to her risk. And in this she was right. Of a sudden the sewing-machine stopped with a premonitory abruptness, and she heard its owner astir. With a haunting sense of dejection and misery for what she had failed to accomplish, Pam whipped from the room back to the little clean kitchen.

And the moment after that, her chances for this time present were ruthlessly snatched away from her. The postmaster awoke to find his neck and his left arm and both his legs asleep, and something wrong with his swallowing apparatus, and became very busy all at once on his little bench. Mrs. Morland came bustling back from Fussitter's and said, "Good gracious! yon clock 's nivver right." Not that she doubted for a moment that it was, but as a kind of reproof to Time for having slipped away from her this afternoon, and got home so much in advance of her.

And Emma Morland emerged from her trying-on room, and came into the little clean kitchen, apparently searching for something, and resolutely keeping her gaze clear of Pam. Pam knew at once what she wanted. It was not anything that eye could see or hands could lay hold of; not pins or petticoats or needles or darning thread. It was counsel and advice, locked up so securely in Pam's own delinquent body, and because of her conduct this afternoon, the girl for very shame and contrition dared not offer to give it. She besought Emma's eye with a pathetic, supplicating look to be asked some favor, however slight, by which she might hope to work back her slow way into Emma's good graces, but that eye knew its business to a hair's-breadth, and went doggedly about it without stumbling into the least collision.

Last of all:

"Do you ... want me, Emma?" Pam asked, in an almost inaudible voice of sorrow and repentance.

"Eh?" said Emma sharply, turning as though she had not rightly heard, and could not imagine what possible subject should lead Pam to address her. "Did ye say owt?"

"Do you want me, Emma?" Pam begged again humbly.

She would have liked to throw herself at Emma's feet and pluck the hem of Emma's skirt, and cling there till Emma poured upon her the benedictory grace of forgiveness.

"What sewd ah want ye for?" Emma asked incomprehendingly. "Naw; ah can do wi'oot ye, thanks."

No; she could do without her, thanks. She who had been so glad to have Pam's help and assistance in the past; who had never done a stitch on her own account without discussing it first with Pam, and whom Pam had always loved to help, could do without Pam now. Pam was no longer necessary to her; was no longer worthy to render assistance. No longer, for very shame, would she be able to enter Emma's little trying-on room, and know the happiness of helping; no longer be able to enter Emma's own heart and talk with her as to a sister.

It was all ended. The lights of life were dropping out one by one like the lights of Hunmouth when you drive away from it along the roadway by night. Into the great darkness of shame she was journeying; it seemed all the old landmarks were being left behind her. In a strange land she would soon find herself. She was on its borders now--but a twist of the road, and her old life would be for ever lost to her.

And then suddenly a vivid flash of resolution shot out and pierced her darkness with golden purpose, like a shaft of sunlight into the dense heart of a thicket. Why should she go on suffering like this? Why should she go on bearing her shameful burden of secrecy and silence round all these tortuous paths and byways of indecision? If she had an aching tooth, would she tramp through the wet and the wind in ceaseless rounds, of which the dentist was the fixed centre? This very night she would take the letter up to the Cliff and leave it at Dixon's. Let him think of her as he would. It was better to bear honorable open pain than ignominious secret torture. The simplicity of the resolve came upon her like a revelation. To think she could have been beating about the threshold of this decision so long without the courage to enter. But that is always the way. When the pain of the tooth first takes us we submit to its suffering. It is only when it has broken our spirit that we are driven on weak legs to the fatal brass plate, and bemoan the many hours of wasted anguish that might have been saved had we made use of the true light when it first illuminated us.

Alas! Pam was not at the dentist's yet, and there was still more suffering for her in that aching molar of crime.

*CHAPTER XXVII*

Soon all was abustle at the Post Office in preparation for the departing mail. The kettle commenced to throb upon the red embers of the little kitchen fire, and pushing out a blithe volume of steam through its pursed lips, appeared to be whistling light-heartedly at the immediate prospect of the cup that cheers. From the second kitchen came the melodious clink of the cups and saucers and tea-spoons; gladsome tea-table music, heard at four o'clock on a hot summer's day, with its queer cracked thirds and minor intervals and faulty diatonics. James Maskill rattled up to the Post Office door again, over the great round cobbles, and tying the reins up into a loop, stimulated hot and dusty letter-bringers to frantic final efforts with fierce cries that he was on the point of departure.

"Noo then, ye need n't gie ower runnin' if ah 'm to tek it."

"Ah s'd sit down, if I was you, an' watch me gan."

"Ay, theer, ye 'll 'ave to mek use o' yer legs."

"Noo, ah 'm just away an' all, so ye know."

Whereupon, at Pam's invitation, he retired to partake of a cup of smoking tea on the Post Office counter--that reappeared immediately upon his forehead in the form of globules--and doubling up plum-bread and butter by laying it flat on his great outstretched palm and closing his hand upon it, slipped it down his mouth cornerwise, as easily as posting a letter. Every now and then he gave his tea-cup a vigorous stir to shake up the sugar in it, and darting to the door of the Post Office, scanned the street up and down for distant letter-bearers on its horizon.

"Noo then," he cried out at Ding Jackson, lurking onward from afar. "'Ow much longer div ye think ah s'll wait for ye?"

"Ah don't know, an' ah don't care," Dingwall Jackson responded irreverently.

"Don't ye?" shouted the postman, with sudden ire.

"Naw," Ding Jackson shouted back at him, going better. "Ah 've no letters."

"Ay, bud ye 'll know if ah get 'old on ye," James Maskill cried threateningly, shaking a doubled fist like a great red brick at him, and as heavy. "An' ye 'll care too. Ye dommed saucy young divvle."

"Gie ower sweerin'," cried Ding Jackson, as loudly as he could. He almost twisted his interior in the effort to publish the postman's offence throughout Ullbrig. "Feythur, James Maskill 's sweerin' at me."

"Ay, ye sewd try an' curb your tongue, Jaames," the postmaster counselled him as he scowled back to his teacup. "It's a 'asty member wi' all on us, an' stan's i' need o' bridlin'."

"Ah 'll bridle 'im," said James morosely, stirring up the sugar again, this time like the dregs of discord. "... When ah get 'im. An' ah know very well where ah can leet of 'im" [alight on him].

At other times this wicked conduct of James's would have grieved and disappointed Pam, particularly in the face of his recent struggles and improvements, but to-day she felt no right to be grieved. Indeed, this sin seemed so inconsiderable by the side of her own that she envied the postman his comparative state of sinlessness. To call somebody a "devil" (which Ding Jackson undoubtedly was, at any time that you used the appellation to him; morning, noon, or night), what was that? But to steal something from somebody who 'd been your best friend. To be a thief. She knew by her sorrows what that was. And James Maskill had been reproved and shamed and corrected for the one, while she, for the other--that could have sent her to prison and shamed her before Ullbrig for ever--she was here, acting the saintly hypocrite.

Oh, no! Whatever James Maskill did now she could never reprove him. The very worst that his temper could do would always be above that level to which, through her sheer sinful tendency, she had sunk. James would never steal. James would never be a thief. From that hour forth she looked up to James Maskill with a new-born reverence and respect, as to one whose life was pure and hallowed.

"Thank ye," said the hallowed one, thrusting the cup and saucer and plate through the kitchen door, and holding them there until he should feel himself relieved of them.

"You 're very welcome, James," Pam answered him, in the softest voice that was left to her. Even her voice, it seemed, was becoming hard and sinful and metallic in these days, to match her soul. "Will you have any more?"

"No, ah s'll 'a my tea when ah get back," the hallowed one responded; and in a lower tone, according to custom: "Is there owt 'at ah can do for ye o' my way?"

Dear, faithful, honest, good-hearted fellow! How he loved her, Pam told herself bitterly. How he trusted her, vile character that she was. How his goodness ought to stimulate and strengthen her own, and draw her back, if so might be, to the old paths she had trodden once.

"No, thank you, James," she said after a pause--in which James only imagined she was trying to think of something.

"Not to-night?" said the hallowed one.

"Not to-night ... thank you," Pam told him.

If a kiss would have been any good to him ... and he 'd asked for it, he would have got it then. Poor James! Lost a kiss because he never dreamed of thinking it would be there, or asking on the off chance.

"Ah 'm still ... tryin' my best," he assured Pam, round the door-post. "Ah 'm not same man ah was, bud that d ... Dingwall, ah mean, gets better o' me yet. Ah know ah s'll not be right while ah 've fetched 'im a bat across 'is lugs. Nor 'e won't, saucy young ... sod. Bud ah 've not gidden up tryin'."

He had not given up trying. And she--was she trying?

Oh, James, James, James! After many days you are bringing back her soul's bread to her. Pray that she feed upon it and be strong. She needs it.

"Good-neet," said James.

"Good-night, James," said Pam.

The postman raised his voice.

"Good-neet, Emma."

"Good-neet, Jaames Maskill," Emma responded.

"Good-neet, Missis Morland."

"Good-neet, Jim lad."

"Good-neet, agen," James said to the postmaster.

"Neet, James. Ye 'll 'ev another nice jonney," the postmaster told him.

"Ay, neet 's about best part o' day, noo," James responded.

He took up the bag, and lingering, cast one extra "Good-neet" over his shoulder towards the door-post once more, in his second and softer voice. It did n't seem for anybody in particular, but more as though he had it to spare, and might as well leave it at the Post Office as anywhere. Pam's voice, however, registered acceptance of it from within, with the grateful inflection for a very welcome gift.

"Ay, good-neet," said the postman, giving her another forthwith; and after hesitating on the impulse of a third, hardened his mouth, swung the bag off the counter by its narrow neck, lunged out into the lurid sunlight, pulled the cart down to meet him, sprang into his place, said "Gee" and "Kt," and was round the brewer's corner in a twinkling, leaving golden clouds behind him.

And as soon as tea was over and the things were cleared, and the house commenced to slip into its peaceful evening mood, she set her plans in motion for the carrying out of her resolve. Viewing the recent discredit into which her washing had fallen with Miss Morland, it required all her nerve to brace herself for a visit of this nature to the bright bedroom overlooking the garden; but stealing a moment when Emma was absent, she did it, changed her light dress for a darker of navy blue, and descended, prepared to receive all Emma's scorn now that it could no longer deter her from her intention. But Emma was nowhere visible when she reached ground-floor again; her accumulated reserves of meekness and charity had been vainly stored. And now her first object was to secure the letter. She reconnoitred the rooms once more, with the end that she might possess herself of it, and hold it in readiness for the first suitable moment that might offer her a chance of departure without being seen. Such departure would not be yet, of course. It would not be till the dusk was well fallen, and the moon on the rise. Until that time there was always the fear of coming into collision with the Spawer about Dixon's farmstead. Above all, she must avoid that. And meanwhile, the letter must be in her keeping against all chance that the one moment most favorable to departure in all other respects should be the least favorable for the procurement of the letter itself.

To her consternation and dismay, she found that the parlor, though she had imagined it to be unoccupied when she listened outside the door, was held in the hands of the schoolmaster. He was seated, reading deeply at the round table, with his elbows on the edge and his hands over his ears, when she wavered upon the threshold. This first frustration cast a terrible shadow over her. She did not know where to go to keep vigil. If she dallied too openly about the house, there was ever the dread that it might involve her awkwardly with one member or other, and rob her of her chance a second time, just at the very moment that the schoolmaster should leave the coast clear. Apparently he had not heard her push the half-open door and stop dead upon the outer mat, for he had never raised his head. Dejected and anxious, she stole back to the little kitchen and twisted her knuckles by the window, watching the slowly deepening sky--so reflective of her own sinking gloom. From here the postmaster's approaching steps drove her into the second kitchen. From the second kitchen the sound of Emma Morland, humming a hymn-tune severely through her tightened lips, and advancing by the passage door, drove her back again, and--as Emma still pushed her advance--up the corkscrew staircase for the second time this night.

"Where 's Pam?" Miss Morland inquired acutely of the postmaster, when she entered--not that she was in active pursuit or need of her, but that the girl's absences now were always a source of suspicious inquiry and speculation.

"En't ye seed 'er?" the postmaster asked innocently. "She 's nobbut just this moment come oot o' kitchen an' ganned upstairs."

"Ay, to wash 'ersen, ah' s'd think," Miss Morland reflected shrewdly to herself. "Ah 'd gie seummut to know what lass 's after."

At that moment, if it could have been revealed to her, the lass was after listening at the top of the staircase with a twisted ear to their solicitudes concerning her whereabouts. Once upon a time, she told herself while she did it, she would never have listened to anything that anybody said, whether she had been the subject of it or not. But now, listening seemed part of her natural defence; she listened with no interest in the thing heard, except only as a means for her own intelligence and safety. At the first sound of words her suspicious ear was up like a cat's at the chattering of birds.

From her place at the head of the twisted stairs she was driven into her bedroom once more by Mrs. Morland. Then, when calm had been restored to the recently ruffled atmosphere of the post house, and it was possible to probe by ear to the uttermost corners of it, she slipped out a cautious head, chose her moment, and stole down by the Sunday staircase. Very gently she pressed upon the parlor door with her cushioned fingers ... very gently ... gently, gently, just so that she ... gently ... gently ... could catch a glimpse.

Ah!

The treacherous door had cracked, all at once, like a walnut-shell under her boot-heel. She was halfway up the stairs again in a trice; holding her palpitating heart and listening terribly over the bannisters for the sounds that should proclaim discovery of her attempt. But none came. Baffled, goaded with desire, half-crying with fear of her enterprise's failure, and yet unable to cry because she lacked the tears to cry with, being only able to pull painful faces; desperate to achieve her purpose and terrified with her own desperation, she was up and down the staircase after this a dozen times; back into her bedroom, listening at the head of the corkscrew stairs; holding her ear to every point of the compass. But never dared she essay entrance of the parlor. That door, just ajar on its hinges, held her more effectually at bay than had it been bolted with great bolts and locked and barred. Dusky night descended, the time was getting ripe for her purpose ... and still she lacked the letter.

Then the greater terror out-terrorised the lesser. Fear of what the consequences might be should she not achieve her purpose to-night drove her downstairs for the last time, and into the parlor. With an air of reckless innocence that pretends it has nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, she pulled the door wide and strode into the room. In the simulation of guiltlessness her bearing for the moment was almost defiant, as though she were braced for going into some hated presence. And indeed, for all the assuring silence of the parlor, she advanced with the full expectation of seeing the schoolmaster's figure looming forth from the table, with his hands to his ears and his back to her, as he had been on her first arrival. But no black shadow interposed itself between her and the window; the chair was empty; the room was void. Gone all this while.... And she in her terror had been letting the precious moments slip through her fingers like water. Her heart, in spite of the misery of her lost opportunities, gave a great bound of exultation when it found the way of its purpose clear.

She sprang across the room and laid hold of the desk. The pleasure of feeling it in her possession again after all her dividing anguish; this union of purpose with opportunity; this path unto righteousness--were more glorious than untold riches. Tremulously she deposed the china shepherdess, and opening the desk thrust in her feverish fingers.

And then, all of a sudden, her heart seemed to stand still. A great sinking, swaying sickness seized her.

The letter was not there.

*CHAPTER XXVIII*

The letter was not there.

Like a wild animal bereft of its young, when the first shock of discovery had had its way with her, she set herself with both hands to rummage the contents of the desk, as though sheer frenzy of desperation alone could restore to her that which was lost. Scarcely even did she regard the objects that her delving brought to the surface, but dug and tore at them all with a blind, consuming energy that revealed the unreasoning horror of her mind; turning and returning and overturning; now above, now below; selecting each thing seemingly with the prefixed idea to reject.

It was not there. The letter that all her life and honor hung upon, that she had thought to place there with her own hands, was not there. It was gone. There did not remain a trace of it. On the floor, upon her hand and knees, she sought distractedly, stroking the carpet with passionate solicitude to deliver her the letter that was not hers--as though it were a great, rough-coated beast that she was coaxing.

And there, on her hands and knees, the schoolmaster came upon her. Through the thick walls of her engrossment she never heard him; care she had thrown to the winds.

Still groping and coaxing, and peering over the floor in the fast gathering dusk, she saw for the first time the shadow that watched her. It said no word at the moment of her rising. Slowly and tremblingly she rose upward, like a faint exhalation, a phantom. Had she continued her vaporous ascent through the ceiling, and through the bedroom ceiling above that, and through the red-tiled roof, and forth into the great eternity of dissolution and nothingness, it would scarcely have been out of keeping with the strange slow spirituality of her rising. All the passionate heat of her search cooled before that presence; her body, that had been so assiduous in its enterprise, froze suddenly to ice; the very life seemed to have been smitten out of her, and her rising but the last muscular relaxation of a body from which the soul had fled.

"Are you ... looking for something?" the shadow asked her, after a terrible moment's silence, when the girl's guilty heart seemed trying to cry aloud and betray her.

It was the old schoolmaster's voice that uttered the question; the tight, hoarse whisper that seemed to strangle his throat in the utterance like a drawn cord. And it was the old schoolmaster's figure that waited upon her answer; the remorseless, condemnatory figure with its hands to its collar, that always, whatever she did, threw her in the wrong. All their intervening relations seemed cut out and done away with. They were back again, splicing their lives at the point where these had broken off on that memorable night in the kitchen. He was above her once more, on the great high judgment seat, and she ... down here--a poor, frail, inconsequential sinner--struggled and wrestled in the bondage of silence before him.

"I?" She spoke in an unsteady voice, all blown to pieces with short breaths, as though she had been running fast and far. "No, no! Only something that I ... that I ... I thought I 'd dropped. Nothing at all ... thank you. It does n't matter."

She wanted to pass him quickly on the strength of that denial--a lie on the face of itself--and get away somewhere, to her bedroom again, before he could question her further; but he stood there without moving, as he had stood in the moonlight, and she dared not advance. She had the fear within her that he might yield her no place.

"You ... will not find it on the floor," he told her.

"I don't ... know what you mean," she found strength to say--but only just.

"The letter," he answered. "You are looking for a letter."

In dead silence, like an executioner's axe, the charge fell, and seemed to sever her anguished head of evasion at one sharp blow from its trembling trunk. She had no power for struggling now; her life of tortured anticipation and mental activity was at an end. It was only a poor, soulless, quivering girl's body that the schoolmaster had in front of him. He might bend and bruise it as he listed; it should show him no resistance.

"It was a letter you were looking for," he taxed her again, his voice gaining severity, it seemed, from her admissive silence, as though he meant forcing her to confess with her lips what she had hoped to let her silence say for her.

"... Have you ... got it?" she inquired, in a dry, empty whisper.

Had she spoken the words with a hollow reed under her lips the tone would have been no more empty.

"It is safe," he said.

And something in the malicious utterance, something significant of exultation for a victory unfairly come by, revealed to the girl in a flash, when, and by what abominable means, it had come into the man's possession.

"You took it," she cried at him, flinging the accusation into his face as though it were a glove from the hand of outraged honor. "You stole it out of my desk!" With all the rapid process of moral despoliation that had been at work upon her during these latter days, and with all the resultant complaisance for crime, the old indignation rose up strong in her against the idea of a mean, petty theft like this. It seemed she might never have sinned or known sin herself, so clear and righteous was her moral eye become of a sudden. "You thief!" she threw at the man. "Coward and thief!"

He made no attempt to resent or defend himself against these puny javelins of her anger. Possession of the letter was so impregnable a position that he could afford to let her expend her ammunition fruitlessly against the walls of his silence.

"And if I did take it?" he asked her merely, in tones of gathering assurance.

"It was not yours to take," she panted at him. "It does not belong to you. Give it me back. You have no right to it."

"It belongs to neither of us," he said, yet without anger. With such a power as this letter in his pocket gave him, he had no need of anger. And of justification he sought none. "My right is as much as yours ... and I am prepared to stand by it. Call me a thief if you like; mere names won't hurt me ... your own harsh treatment has hardened me too much for that. We are both of us thieves."

"... I was going to take it back to-night..." the girl protested, part in asseveration of her innocence, part in supplication that he should restore her the letter.

"Perhaps you were," he said, with a callous indifference to her intentions that boded ill for his own. Apparently he was little concerned with the girl's atonement or questions of restitution. "But I have something ... to say to you first. We cannot talk here. Put on your hat ... we will go outside."

His assumption of authority and dominion roused the last red cinders of the girl's independence. Now that her back was to the wall and further retreat was impossible, the energy, hitherto dribbling away in futile skirmishes, accumulated itself in frontal activity. She was shamed--bitterly, horribly shamed--but even shame has its pride.

"Give me the letter..." she said doggedly, and held out her hand.

"Put on your hat..." he told her. "We will talk about that outside."

"I will not go with you. Give me the letter first. If you give me the