letter I will go.

"You shall have the letter back ... in good time. Not now. If you speak so loudly they will hear us. Put on your hat."

"I will not put on my hat."

"... I think you will."

"When will you give me back the letter?"

"When ... we have come to an understanding."

The word "understanding" tolled out across the dreary wastes of her consciousness like a death-bell.

"... Will you give it me to-night?"

"We can discuss that."

"Give it me now ... and I will go with you."

"No; I cannot give it you now. You have had your way ... in other things. I must have mine, for once, in this. Put on your hat."

She would have gone on her knees to anyone else in the world that should have obtained this dominion over her, but before this man, no. To beg of him, her shame was ashamed. Knowing what he had been wanting of her all these months--what he was wanting of her now--she dared not plead for a single concession; dared not put herself under the yoke of one small favor. Doubly she was at a disadvantage before him. All her wiles of womanhood; all her tears; all her soft persuasions; her clasping of hands; her dove-like wooing with the voice ... all that dear pedlar's basket of feminine graces to win the hearts and minds of man must be left undisplayed. To this man, of all men on earth, she must not plead.

"If I will not put on my hat?" she said.

She dared not bind herself in direct negation to the refusal, but she suggested the act--drawing pride for it indirectly--with the twofold intention of expressing a contemplated resolve she was far from feeling, and of arriving at some knowledge of the degree to which the man was prepared to push his ill-gotten power.

"But you will," he said.

There was something so black about the insinuation--as though he himself were anxious to save her the sight of what might be in store for her if she persisted--that she dared hazard no second contingency. They remained for a second or two in silence, and the slow melting of her obstinacy into consent was as palpable during these moments as the melting away of a fragment of ice on a fishmonger's slab. No other word passed between them then. Very quietly the schoolmaster opened the door and stood by the wall while the girl slid by him, cowed and trembling.

The postmaster, sitting on the high Governmental stool in the Post Office, with his back to the window and his newspaper held up above his head to catch the last red reflection from the darkening sky, staring upward at the crowded firmament of print through his great glasses as though he were star-gazing, heard the front door close, and looking over the ribbed glass screen into the roadway, saw Pam and the schoolmaster pass together in the direction of the brewer's corner.

"Emma," said he, putting his head in at Miss Morland's door next moment; and more urgently still, not discerning her there at first in the dusk: "Emma lass, are ye theer?"

"Ay, ah seed 'em," said the severe voice of his daughter. "Div ye want lamp noo?"

*CHAPTER XXIX*

That same night the Ullbrig chimes were as clear to hear at Cliff Wrangham as though they 'd rung in Dixon's stackgarth, and Dixon shook his head.

"Yon 's a bad sound," said he dubiously. "Ah 'm jealous we s'll be gettin' some rain before morn."

And while all Ullbrig slept (save two), and all Cliff Wrangham (save one), a great, black, umbrella-shaped cloud pushed up its head into the sky above where the sun had sunk, like a mammoth mushroom. Soon there were no stars left behind Ullbrig church for the tower to show against; half the sky was black as ink and the mushroom still growing. Out of the advancing darkness came wafts of cool, wet wind that shook the sleeping, windows and casements gently, as though to awaken them to preparation, and bid them: "Be ready--we are coming." And almost while their breath was whispering the warning, the first rain drop spat sideways against the Spawer's window, and after that the second and a third and a fourth. And thenceforward, through the hours till daybreak--that never broke at all--the silence seethed with the steadfast downpouring of rain.

All over the country-side this night there would be white faces peering out through the streaming wet windows, for your farmer is a light sleeper where his crops are at stake; and men's low, calamitous voices heard discussing the swift change in their prospects; and stocking-feet stirring muffled about boarded floors; and bedsteads creaking as occupants sit up in them, and roll out with sudden-roused anxiety or throw themselves flat again in the despondency that knows too well to need any ocular confirmation of its fears; and the sounds of masters, calling urgently upon men by name in the great attic above, to inquire whether this, that, or the other had been safely done last night before turning in.

For three days the rain fell, almost without intermission. At times, for variation, great big-bellied clouds of white mist rolled over the land from the sea, and hid it, and rolled away again. They heard the booming of the minute-gun from Farnborough, and the hoot of passing steamers. More than once, during these three days, the Spawer extended his excursions--with fitful energy of action--right beyond the confines of Dixon's farm, and showed a set face of purpose towards Ullbrig. But it was all mere moonshine. The thought of his advent in Ullbrig village, with his streaming mackintosh and soaking cap and be-muddied boots, deterred him from his folly in time. And whenever he turned back it was always with a certain consolatory pious pain of renunciation, as though he had just got the better of a great temptation, and had gained a victory instead of losing one.

*CHAPTER XXX*

Early on the morning of the fourth day, which was a Saturday, Barclay was sighted in his spring cart, driving down to Ullbrig to catch Tankard's 'bus; the farm lad sat by his side to hold up the great gig umbrella, with cylindrical slashes in its cover, through which a cow could have jumped, and two or three of its complete ribs showing. Dixon, standing at the pump in his white waterproof and leggings, his corn-sack headgear, and his six-penny telescope, as though he 'd been a skipper, and Barclay's cart (with miniature waves of water curling off at its wheels) an apparently friendly craft, hailed him as the farm lad consigned to his master the care of the umbrella, and clambered down to throw open the lane gate.

"Noo then."

"Noo then," said Barclay in turn, showing his face, and waving the reins at him with the right hand.

"Ye 're not cuttin' owt to-day, it seems?" Dixon inquired jocularly.

"Nay, ah 'm waitin' while it ripens a bit. Ah thought ye 'd 'a been agate leadin' yours by noo."

"Ay," said Dixon, "... 'appen we may if rain dizz n't lift. We mud as well 'ave it damp as dry, ah think. 'Ow diz it suit ye noo, this tee-tawtal weather?"

"Nay, it dizz n't fall t' be no wuss nor it is. That 's 'ow it suits me," Barclay responded. "It 's no use stayin' i' 'oose, watchin' crops waste. Ah 'm away to Oommuth."

"To buy a bit o' band, ah 's think?" Dixon hazarded, with an internal twinkle.

"Ay, a bit o' band 'll not come amiss i' 'arvest time."

"Don't loss it o' yer way back, onny road," Dixon charged him. "Shall ye come wi' Tankard?"

"Ay," said Barclay oracularly. "Gen ah don't come later, ah shall."

... And drove away in the sloppy channel of the lane, with the clash of the gate behind him for farewell.

The farm lad, returning after a while in sole charge of the cart, with the umbrella totally inverted over him, using one of its rents as a window, held further parley with Dixon at close quarters by the same gate--that Dixon opened for him to save a dismount--concerning his master's departure, and the world in general. The conversation brightened Dixon's face as it proceeded, and sent him back to the house with a sparkle in his eye, as though he 'd been asked to pronounce judgment on a glass of XXX, and could say "Proper stuff this!" with all his heart.

"Noo, ah 've gotten to larn seummut ti morn, onny road," he announced to the household assembled in the big kitchen, from whose window the stack of faces had been interestedly observant of this second conversation. And in response to the very general inquiry: "What 'a ye larnt, then?" answered with another: "What div ye think?"

"What sewd we think, an' all?" Miss Bates demanded rebelliously. "Folks like me 'as no time to think."

"Nay, they 'd do better if they did," Dixon assented, with his imperturbable geniality.

"Ay, or they 'd do less, 'appen," Miss Bates snapped at him.

"Ah don't know i' what way," Dixon decided amiably. "Noo, div ye gie it up? Ah bet ye weean't guess, onny on ye."

"Sun 's shinin' i' Oolbrig, 'appen," Arny suggested.

"Feythur Mostyn 's gannin' to slart [daub] a sup o' paint ower t' front of 'is 'oose," Jeff said.

"Nay, ye 'll none on ye get gain [near] 'and it," Dixon said, not desiring, however, to give them too much rope, lest they might. "It 's a weddin'."

"Ay, an' ah know 'oo's it is!" Miss Bates cried, emerging suddenly at the open door of her rebellious silence, to demonstrate the superiority of her intelligence, and shaking it at him as though it were a broom. "It 's Pam's, an' she 's gannin' to marry schoolmester."

"Ay, that 's right enough," Dixon said, with the perceptible reluctance of admission that would have wished the news--or Miss Bates' guess--to have been otherwise, particularly in view of her triumphant: "Ah knowed very well."

"'Oo telt ye she was, though?" Jeff demanded of his father, with Thomasine unbelief.

"Barclay lad, just noo."

"An' where did 'e get it fro'?"

"Nay, 'e 'd gotten it off too well for me to ask 'im owt o' that. 'E telt me it wor ower village 'at schoolmester 'ad asked Pam to 'ave 'im, an' she 'd ta'en 'im. Ah 'm not sure schoolmester 'issen 'ad n't telt a goodish few."

"Ay, 'e 'll want to tell 'em an' all," Miss Bates agreed gustily. "'E 's been after 'er long enough. Mah wod! Ah 'd 'a seed 'er somewhere before ah 'd 'a looked at 'er twice, all time she 's been snuffin' 'er nose at me. They want giein' marriage, both on 'em. Ah sewd 'a 'ad to be asked a good few times before ah 'd tek up wi' a man same as yon--old enough to be my feythur, very nigh."

"Ay, it teks all sorts to mek a wuld," Dixon pronounced drily. "We s'll see what sort on a man teks up wi' you, 'appen."

"'Appen," said Miss Bates, with great reservoirs of meaning wisdom dammed up behind the accent of that word. And then, not finding quite sufficient satisfaction in this inflectional superiority, could not resist the temptation to cry out: "Bud 'e 'll 'ave to be different fro' be yon sort of a man, onny road."

"When 's weddin'?" Arny asked.

"Nay, ah can't tell ye owt more, wi'oot mekkin' it up," Dixon said. "Pick what there is for yersens. Ah lay, ye 'll manage to fin' seummut fresh in it." And looking towards the mid-parlor door: "'As 'e come doon yet?" he inquired.

"Ay, a goodish bit sin'," Miss Bates said. "Bud ah thought it was women 'at did all gossipin'!" she declaimed angrily, seeing the blessed standard of intelligence-bearer thus being wrenched from her grasp and carried into the Spawer's breakfast-table by another. And raising her voice more loudly as the figure of Dixon disappeared from the kitchen on its coveted errand: "Ay, ye can talk aboot women talkin', mah wod! Ye can an' all. Bud what aboot a man's tongue 'at must needs gan off as soon as it 's gotten to know seummut, an' tell it to ivverybody? Ah 'd for shame to show mysen so throng wi' other people's news!" And thus commencing to whip up the top of indignation within her, till it hummed loudly and threateningly, found an effective lodgment for her hand all of a sudden on the side of Lewis's cheek. "Put yer mucky fingers gain-'and that bacon, if ye dare!"

So the Spawer was not the only one to whom the news of Pam's engagement came as a blow, only he lacked Lewis's privilege of crying for it.

*CHAPTER XXXI*

Sunday morning opened out scowlingly, with an angry watery look that saw no pleasure in anything. There was no rain, but there were great black clouds heaped up in the sky, every one containing a thunderstorm, if not a couple. Such clouds they were as you can make for yourselves by dipping a thumb in ink and smearing circularly over paper. Between the superimposed piles of them at times, as they rifted, the cold grey light poured down upon the level landscape below like pailfuls of water. The chill drops still spangled everywhere from the recent rain. Every bird that flew out of the hedges scattered diamonds in its passage. The grass was bowed down beneath its watery burden, drop upon drop was strung on the bended blades. The trailing porch of flowering tea hung weightily over the door, ready to discharge its accumulated wetness down any neck that passed under. On all the window-sills were long, tremulous watery rows of jewels. The whitewashed walls of the house were soaked and mottled; everywhere about the path and laneways were great pools of gathered water, shivering under the breath that blew over them now and again, in apprehension of more.

A very day, indeed, for hot coffee, odorous ham, and smoking mushrooms--as all these ministrants to the stomach's comfort on the Spawer's breakfast-table there are--but the Spawer only looks at them in staring disregard.

This last blow about Pam has struck him so suddenly and so forcefully that he can only keep feeling himself over, and wonder what bones are broken, and how many. His pride, he knows, has suffered a nasty shock. All along he has been reckoning upon the girl as though she were an actual possession, to be left or taken at his own sweet will; a fixed star in the firmament. And lo! now he finds she is very much of a planet, with a path of her own, that has swum into his ken and swum out again, leaving the astronomer stuck in the mud with his telescope to his eye, a pitiable object of miscalculation.

And by turns he is incredulous and despairing, and hopeful and indignant and irate. She is not going to be married. It is a lie. There is no truth in it. She is going to be married. The shadow-man, the moonlight, the parting, her avoidance of him--all point to the truth of it.

Pam was marrying a pair of bell-bottomed trousers and a shabby morning coat. Horrible! horrible!

Oh, the sting was bitter! The disappointment supreme. Even his love for the girl was so steeped in the sense of humiliation and of grief that she should have fallen to such extent below the standard of his measurement, that at times almost he failed to tell whether he really loved her any longer, or was possessed only of pity.

He could n't believe it. On his soul, he could n't believe it. He knew it was true, but he could n't believe it. On Sunday morning, wet or fine, he must go to Ullbrig and learn the truth. Father Mostyn would be sure to know and tell him.

And meanwhile he had to garb himself with the extra scrupulousness of attire for covering his torn pride. Now that he was humbled he must be very proud. He must show no tell-tale flinchings. He must laugh with the lazy, half-contemptuous humor, as though this little rustic world ... Morbleu! ... this little pasture of bucolic clods ... this fallow field of earthen intelligences ... you understand? ... this pitiable place called Ullbrig, meant no more to him in serious reality than Jarge Yenery's straw hat. If this thing were so, as he knew and dared not believe ... it should be buried in his bosom and heaped under a thousand simulations of indifference. Neither the girl nor any in Ullbrig should have the gratification of knowing that he had ever acted to her as other than the friend.

*CHAPTER XXXII*

It lacked yet some minutes to service time when the Spawer passed up the path to church. In the porch old Obadiah Beestman, with a bell-rope in one hand and a bell-rope in the other, and his right foot slung in the noose of a third, was still ringing his dismal ding, dang, dong, as the Spawer entered. Obadiah is also clerk and sexton too, and is shrewdly suspected by his Reverence of Nonconformist proclivities into the bargain.

He nodded solemn greeting to the Spawer as the Spawer arrived--the ringing of the bells being to Obadiah as much a part of the morning's devotion as the Prayers and Litany--if not more--and told him, "Onny on 'em to left 'and." By which he meant that the Spawer was at liberty to occupy any pew that caught his fancy, without fear of trespassing upon rights or being disturbed. Not a soul, so far, was in church. The Spawer picked his favorite pew, with its faded green cushion and family of hassocks--the grand patriarch standing a foot and a half high, and sloped for the knees to rest on without unnecessary bending; with others of various shapes and sizes, down to the baby sawdust-stuffed buffet, no bigger than a bath bun. Once upon a time, some God-fearing household of the Established Faith had come here week by week to worship, and brought these hassocks to kneel upon, and this cushion for ease in sitting, and had died or gone away, while the tokens of their devotions were lapsed into possession of the church. In his old right-hand corner, with his shoulders fitted into the angle of the high pew-back and side, he sat and turned over the books within reach; hymns, ancient and modern, commencing at page twenty; prayer-books, decorated with rude designs of the human body, with poems against theft, and so much inscribed with names of ownership that the nine points of law and possession were merged in them quite; some small, some large; all clammy and smelling of the vault. Up and down the woodwork of the pew, and the hymn-books, and the green cushions, were the glistening tracks of lethargic but progress-making snails. All over the damp walls of the church they ran too, like luminous hieroglyphics of death and decay; and over the mural tablet in marble to the memory of Francis Shuttlewell Drayman, one time vicar, who served God in this church faithfully for forty-nine years, and was given rest as a reward for his labors on February 19, 1799. Also Hannah, wife of the above, who departed this life in search of her beloved husband, August 5, 1804.

As the Spawer sits and ponders over these things, trying to assimilate them by a sort of spontaneous process with his own state--and find one common key which shall fit all the varied wards of the locks of life--the worshippers begin to assemble. Mrs. Hesketh, holding her youngest by the hand and piloting it (whether a boy or a girl does not exactly make itself apparent to a superficial observation) up the aisle in front of her, at the manifest peril of falling over it, and trying by jerks of the arm to shake its stare off the Spawer, which, however, requires a stronger arm. They disappear into a pew somewhere under the lectern, where much sibilant whispering begins to issue immediately upon their incarceration, as though they were cooking something; and every second the big forehead of the infant, surmounted by its sailor hat, shows itself as far as the eyebrows over the pew back and goes down suddenly, as though its supports had been sundered. Old Mary Bateman shivers up the aisle too, on the far third-class side, with her brown charity shawl drawn tightly over her shoulders and clasped into the pit of her stomach by invisible hands wrapped up in it, as though she were cold and hungry, and the pinched, alms-house look of humility about the lips of her bowed face befitting a pauper. Being entirely dependent for everything in life upon the mercy of God, and having a very proper value and appreciation of it--which is too infrequently the case with people able to earn their own living--she has long since discarded pride as an unmeaning and useless appanage, and walks humbly before the Lord and her fellow-beings (if they will kindly pardon the liberty of her calling them such) as the devoutest Christian might desire. At Sacrament she will wait until the last lip has left the cup, and only presume to approach the table when sought out and summoned there by the priestly forefinger. And after death she will go underground in a nice deal coffin, as being cheaper and more perishable, so that she may the sooner mix her dust with the soil and make room for somebody else when the time requires. After her comes Mrs. Makewell, who deems it advisable to show herself occasionally beneath the priestly eye, as a reminder that she is still able to go out charing ("God be praised, your Rivrence") at eighteenpence a day, with her beer; also as a midwife when requested; and will give his Reverence judicious samples of her bronchitis during pauses in the service, knowing that his Reverence hears every cough and scrape and clearing, and bestows port wine upon the worthy. While she is trying to fasten herself into her pew there are sounds of a massive sneck being lifted somewhere round the chancel where the vestry is, and the scuffle of loose boots that are too big for the control of the feet that don't fit them echoing over a flagged floor. This, the Spawer knows by experience, is the choir. He even sees them peering round from the far end of the choir stalls and pushing each other out into the chancel, and hears the strident hiss of much whispering, which at closer quarters would resolve itself into:

"See-ye! Old Moother Bateman! old Moother Bateman!" with an unpublishable effusion upon the subject of this unfortunate from the pen (or the lips, as he would n't know what to do with a pen if he had it) of the Ullbrig bard. "Gie ower shovin', ye young divvle." "Look at Spawer fro' Dixon's, like a stuffed monkey in a menagerie." "Let 's chuck a pay [pea] at 'im."

The sound of the massive latch resounding acutely through the empty building a second time puts a death-like stop to the chancel activity, and an august step heard passing over the flagstones in lonely majesty of silence announces beyond all doubt that his Reverence has arrived. At the same moment the Spawer, with a strange, nervous fluttering about his heart--as though he were about to face some great audience in his musical capacity--hears the whispering echo of light footsteps going up the winding stairs of stone from the door in the porch to the organ loft. If he had been a gargoyle, or a sculptured effigy of Peter, his ears would have heard that tread, and known the maker of it. Every step of the way he followed her progress. Now she had two more left, and then the loft door. The two were taken, and the loft door creaked on its hinges. She was in the church and behind him. By an instinct as unerring as that which guides a homing bird he felt, with a painful throbbing of the throat, the fact of his recognition. He knew, almost as well as if he had been looking at the scene from some high point of vantage--higher even than the girl's--that she was gazing down upon him from the organ loft. And with this consciousness was poured into him from a vial more bitter the knowledge of her sudden start; the constrained tightening of her lips; the light suddenly extinguished in her eye at sight of him; all her being standing still like a human apostrophe and saying:

"He here!"

Yes; he was here. Miserable wretch that he was; he was here.

Into his shoulders he drew his neck; wedged his head down firmly, and sat without moving in the corner of his pew. On other Sundays he would have looked round at her and smiled his greeting upward. But not now. He dared not risk any such greeting now, lest he should look to find the girl's face turning from him. Without any shadow of doubt, their alienation was complete. He who had been regarded as a friend at the first was come to be regarded as a persecutor now. Even his presence there this morning was a persecution to the girl; a menace to her. She could trust him no longer. She suspected his intentions of dishonor, and was striving to hold at arm's length a man who hung about the skirts of her encouragement. He renewed his suspended breathing with a measure of relief when he heard the sliding rattle of the manual doors, and knew that her eyes were removed from him at last.

And then he knew that another figure had gone up to the organ loft with the girl, and was contemplating him from on high; a silent, spectral figure, whose flesh seemed constituted of pale moonlight; and whose garb was the shadow of night.

*CHAPTER XXXIII*

"Ha! this is beautiful of you," his Reverence said, coming up to the Spawer after the service and enfolding his hand in that warm, balmy, beneficent softness of palm. "To come three miles on a morning like this for the sake of worshipping in the true Faith. Beautiful! beautiful! quite an example to our Ullbrig laggards, it 'll be talked of. Ullbrig has only three yards to come ... and it does n't come those, as you see. When Ullbrig comes, look for the Millennium or port wine--generally port wine. There 's no mistaking the symptoms. Mrs. So-and-So's liver 's no better. Put on your best black dress and go to church this morning, Janie; a bottle of his reverence's port would do her good. Take care and sit where he can see you and sing as loud as you can. Show him how capitally you can find all your places, and don't stare about you when he 's preaching. That 's our Ullbrig way. Go to church to get something out of it if you can. 'His reverence gets paid for preaching; we ought to get something for going. That 's only fair.' See what his reverence the vicar 's to put up with in a place like this. _Ex nihilo nihil fit_. That 's our motto; which, being rendered according to Ullbrig theologians, means: Nothing done without good value given for it in return. If Nonconformity had n't its tea-urns and its bath buns it would n't hold sway over Ullbrig another twenty-four hours. Plenty of hot tea and big bath buns, with plenty of flies and currants in 'em; that 's the way to subjugate the heathen bucolic beast. Music's no good--any more than the Church. We 're dogs with bad names to start with, both of us. Musicians are unscrupulous, dissipated vagabonds, such as you, that live by their wits, as everybody knows. Vicars of the Established Church are children of Satan and prophets of Baal. We 're both in the same boat. And," said he, picking up the dismembered mortar-board from its place by the water-bottle, "this morning we shall have to swim for it. You can't go back to Cliff Wrangham in the teeth of a storm like this that 's brewing."

"It 's awfully good of you..." the Spawer began. "But really, I counted the risks when I came. I 'm ready to take my chance."

"Ha! not a bit of it! not a bit of it!" his Reverence objected, lifting up his forefinger. "You shall take your chance with me. It 'll be a dry chance, if frugal. We don't get so many faithful here that we can afford to treat them with indifference. Come along with you. We 'll lock up and make a bolt for it. I daresay we can find something in the larder to serve us in lieu of lunch if the storm sets in. And judging by the sound of it"--a prolonged peal of thunder spread itself out above them and shook the hollow fabric of the church to its uttermost corner--"it 's going to be a stayer."

Together they made the round of the building, closing up all the swing windows against the deluge that must inevitably come, and giving the lock of the exterior vestry door two turns as the clerk had admonished them, set the thick fibre mat close against the lower chink to oppose any intrusive swill of water, and did what they thought best in such cases as those where a diamond pane lacked in the leaded windows; removing the hassocks from below, and spreading a mouldy cushion or two to absorb the bulk of what wetness came through.

They had only just completed the last of their preparations when a vivid streak of lightning flashed in the yellow, murky air like a knife-blade, and seemed to rip up the great baggy canopy of water suspended above them at one slice. A roar of enraged thunder followed the deadly thrust, and the rain fell whizzing to earth next moment like arrows.

His Reverence gathered up his cassock in both hands as far as the knees, and screwing up his mouth and aiming a way for himself with one eye through the thick downpour to the Vicarage gate--but a dozen paces or so from the porch--made a game dash for cover.

"Ha! capital! capital!" his Reverence was saying at the other side of the close, bruised, blistered, and by this time rain-soaked door, wiping the drops off his chin and nose-end, and running the handkerchief round the inner rim of his Roman collar. "That 's one of the beauties of living by your own porch. The elements have n't any terrors for you," and stamping his feet upon the flags to shake out the legs of his trousers, where he had rucked them over his shoes, he led the way into the sanctum sanctorum, so full for the Spawer with memories of by-gone happiness.

A dual sense of gladness and sadness possessed him as he walked forward. Here he was very close to, and here he was very far from, the spirit of Pam. Out of every tile he trod on some brooding remembrance of the girl rose up as though his foot had dislodged it; wound about him like the sorrowing smoke from a funeral pyre and dissolved. In every corner of the room they entered, the spirit of the girl seemed to linger. All about the room were the visible tokens of the girl's presence--tokens so acute that to each of them his mind's eye supplied the absent figure of the girl as she had been at the actual moment of its accomplishment. Here she was stooping to straighten the antimacassar of a chair; here she was smoothing a cushion; here she was adjusting the objects on his Reverence's writing-table.

And because the Spawer's heart was full of the girl, they did not touch upon Pam first of all. Instead, they talked of the storm, of the thunder, of the crops.

And all the while his Reverence was making excursions to various corners of the storm-darkened room; opened the cupboard door and plunged his hands with a rattle into a hidden knife basket; tried the blades on his thumb, and sprang them critically against his palm for selection; jingled amid silver forks, and counted them to his requirements, large and small; brought forth glasses, tumblers and wine glasses, and liqueur; then casters and bottled condiments; plates and napery, and laying them on the far end of the big dining-table, cleared that space near the window for their ultimate disposal.

"Let 's see ... one, two ... did I bring the forks? To be sure. What am I thinking of? Capital! capital! I 've been so long in other people's clover, you see, that I 'm forgetting how to graze on my own meagre grassland. That 's better--and the salt. Well! and what 's the concerto been doing all this time? Made headway, has it?"

He picked open a folded table-cloth by its two corners, and shook it out of its stiff, snowy creasing.

The Spawer told him that he was afraid ... it had n't been doing much. To tell the truth (that candid truth at which the Spawer was becoming such an adept), the weather had corrupted him. First of all it had been too fine ... and then it had been too wet. This rain had unsettled him. It had washed out all his inspiration. He 'd only felt inclined to stick his fingers in his pockets and shiver over fires. The keys were too cold and damp. There was no warmth about them.

His Reverence gathered the cloth, and spread it over the table. "Indeed? I suppose you 've not seen much of Pamela ... since I left?" he asked casually.

The Spawer's heart hit him under the chin.

"Pam?" he replied, as though for the moment nothing had been further than this girl from his thoughts. "Very little. Let 's see. One ... no, twice, I believe. Yes; twice to speak to since you 've been away."

"Ha!" said his Reverence, and smoothed the cloth scrupulously down all its creases and over the corners of the table.

What did that oracular "Ha!" mean? Did it mean that his Reverence knew the whole history of those two times--or suspected it? ... or knew nothing; suspected nothing? There are moments when an ambiguous monosyllable is more potent than the wisest of words--and this was one of them. The Spawer waited a little space, while his Reverence passed his smooth palm backwards and forwards over the snowy surface, in the hopes that he might add something to that unexplanatory "Ha!" But his Reverence said nothing. He might have been waiting too.

"I 've heard, though..." the Spawer began, feeling the discomfort of that monosyllable like a drop of cold water down his neck, and stopped there suggestively.

"Ha!" His Reverence passed a concluding hand over the table-cloth, and straightened himself with puckered mouth and portentous brows. "... Unfortunately true. Unfortunately true. Yes."

"Unfortunately" true! The Vicar, then, was his ally.

"... At first," he said, professing suddenly that the destiny of two drops, trickling slowly towards each other on the window-pane, was of more moment to him than the matter of the girl, "... at first ... I hardly believed it. I suppose, though ... you say there 's no mistake."

His Reverence shook his head, and passed over to the cupboard again.

"A very great mistake," he said, stooping on one knee and speaking into the cavernous recesses of the shelves; and after a moment: "A very great mistake," he said. "I 'm not surprised at your incredulity. Of course, being ignorant of circumstances, you 've nothing but your judgment to guide you--and plainly judgment would lead you to pronounce against such a form of proceeding. Yes!" He raised himself from the floor with the twisted face for a rheumatic twinge in his knee, and returned once more to his table preparations. "I must admit that the girl has disappointed me. Of course ... ever since the beginning--as Ullbrig will tell you if you care to pay it the compliment of asking (which I don't suppose you will)--this has been a contingency to reckon with. But I 'd hoped. You see ... it 's different. Things latterly had looked so favorable. I thought the musical experiment was likely to succeed. Ha! and the French too. Yes, yes; the French too. It seemed to have stimulated the girl to aspirations altogether beyond Ullbrig. I thought we 'd trained her palate to require daintier food in every respect than Ullbrig could give her. And then ... all at once ... to be beaten on the post. Of course--" he drew attention to what followed with a quiet gesture, as though it were really quite obvious enough without the superfluous emphasis of pointing out--"... it would be quite possible for me to forbid the thing--veto it completely and put a stop to it once for all. But then..." he screwed up his mouth for a moment's reconsideration of what such an act would effect, "for the present I have n't quite found my justification for this extreme measure."

"He is ... a schoolmaster?" the Spawer hazarded.

"Exactly; our Ullbrig schoolmaster. A worthy enough man, no doubt, in his own particular way--but it is n't the way I had in my mind for Pam. I believe he excels somewhat in free-hand and rule of three. These are his specialties. His father--if my memory serves me right--" here the Vicar appeared to interrogate his memory through fringed lashes, "... was a--ha!-small greengrocer and mixed provision dealer--Knaresbro' way, I believe. Of course, under ordinary circumstances, I should have had no alternative but to nip the whole affair in the bud; pack Pam away, if need be, and arrange meanwhile for the fellow to be transplanted in some peculiarly far and foreign soil. But as it is ... that seems an unnecessary setting of the mills to grind without grist. If we stop this marriage..." His eye roamed over the table, where knives and forks and spoons and plates and glasses commenced to array themselves with a semblance of order beneath his fingers. The Spawer's eye shifted, as a meeting seemed imminent. "... Perhaps, when I 'm dead and gone, she may contract a worse. Situated as she is, without friends or society, we can't hope to place her in life as by right and reason she should be placed. Perhaps, if one could only finance the girl, and secure fashionable influence for her, and float her upon the social sea, she might repay the investment cent for cent. But on the other hand ... there 's always a fear. Knowing nothing of the temptations of society life, she might fall to the first barrel like a lame pigeon. Besides, the girl shows no hankerings after the flesh-pots. There 's not a pinch of mundane salt in her nature. So why apply it with one's own fingers, and spoil her in the seasoning? Ha! why indeed? Therefore, as things stand, she must be sacrificed. This man wants her and she wants him--more strongly than even I 'd supposed--and when all 's said and done, we might only make worse of it if we tried to twist human nature to our own preconcerted theories. At least, the fellow has no positive vices--they are mostly negative. He is steady, sober, respectable; a hard worker, likely--so far as one can foresee--to provide the girl with a certain home for life. For an indefinite period they may remain at Ullbrig, where--except for those inevitable little disturbances which we may expect under conditions of matrimony--her existence will be but slightly changed. Of course, she will have to relinquish her postal duties, but her parochial work will suffer no modification.

"Ha! now for the larder. Let 's see what there is to pick. Do you feel anything in the lobster way? Here 's a pie that Pam 's cooked and stuffed into the larder for me--knowing I should be back too late to lay in stock for Sunday. Dear girl. Why in the world could n't she think as beautifully for herself as she does for others? And here 's his reverence's brown loaf, and some beet, and some herring olives. Come, come! We shan't do so badly."

"You only got back last night?" the Spawer inquired.

"Last night only," his Reverence rejoined, dispersing his various acquisitions about the table. "Came along with Friend Tankard from Hunmouth. Poor Friend Tankard! I think he gets slower and slower. Some day, mark my words, he 'll set out from Hunmouth, and never reach Ullbrig at all. That 'll be the end of him. However, he did just manage to pull us through this time, and for the rest of the evening I was interviewing our errant sister. But she stood firm. I tried to shake her on all points; had her in tears even. Yes, poor girl, had her in tears. She rained copiously, but it only seemed to water the roots of her resolve. She used the tears of my making to beg to me with. Ha! Let 's see ... to be sure! The beer. You 're a beer man, at least, are n't you?--even though you stop short of whiskey. Capital! capital! I 'm going to offer you a little specialty of my own. It 's a local beer--not Ullbriggian, by the way--but from the district, and you 'll say you never tasted its equal. Foams like champagne and bites like a nettle. Mild withal."

He disappeared from sight on this new errand, and returned, after a remote sound of clinking, with half a dozen bottles of his specialty, three by the neck in each hand.

"Here we are! If the light were n't so bad, I 'd ask you to examine the color. But that 's no use. We 'll let that go, and judge by the taste alone.... And so--" By a skilful intonation he cleared his voice of the beer, and skipped back to the old topic where they had been before. "... In the end we allowed the matter to stand, and deferred judgment."

"And they will be married..." the Spawer began.

He was thankful beyond measure that the Vicar picked him up without delay, for his voice went suddenly as husky as bran.

"Not yet! not yet!" his Reverence said. "That's quite another thing. Though, for that matter, the girl wished to prevail over my scruples even there, and persuade me to an actual date and definite consent. But no. They must possess their souls in patience until I 've had opportunity to study them under these new conditions. I 'm prepared to let her go, since her happiness requires it, but I 'm not going to throw her. Besides ... a little object lesson of this kind appeared to me desirable. As I pointed out to Pam, the man's conduct in the matter left much to be desired. Had he been possessed of the natural instincts of a gentleman he would have approached me first, before intruding himself upon the girl's affections."

"Of course," the Spawer acquiesced hurriedly.

He loathed himself for a cowardly renegade as he did so, but the priest's eye, to his guilty vision, fixed him with such a meaning glance of severity that he felt anything short of verbal agreement would betray him.

"Of course," Father Mostyn repeated, with renewed emphasis. "The proper way--indeed, the only way for a gentleman--would have been to approach me in the first instance, and receive my sanction before unsettling the girl with a suit which subsequent events might prove to be undesirable. But there, of course, you have the man, unfortunately. I daresay his nature would be quite unable to appreciate the niceness of the point--even if you explained it to him. Now you and I"--here the terrible condemnatory look seemed to be fixed on the Spawer again--"know these little matters by instinct, as it were. Such things as those are in our blood. We don't work out our conduct by free-hand and rule of three. It 's inbred in us. We act upon them as spontaneously as a pointer points. Ha!" He ticked off the first and second fingers of the left hand with the magnetic index-finger of the right. "Bread ... corkscrew..." and hesitated at the third as though uncertain whether there did not exist some still further necessity. "Ha! to be sure," he said, and wagged his shoulders, "cheese." He ambled genially out of the room again, and returned presently with a loaf of white bread on a wooden trencher, a corkscrew, a lever, and a dish of Cheddar.

"Now, come along! come along!" he said, all his being fused in the glowing warmth of hospitality, and sending forth its comforting rays even to the Spawer's chill fibres. "There 's nothing to wait for--except grace from Heaven. That's it. Draw up your chair and make yourself at home."

And bending his head over the tinned lobster: "In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

*CHAPTER XXXIV*

And now, thinks the Spawer, with the fine egoism of wounded love, there is not in the whole world a heart so heavy as his.

But he is wrong, for here in Ullbrig hangs a heavier.

Heaven knows Pam had sinned in a hard market, and bought her iniquity dear. Other people, worldly people of experience and sagacity, know how to obtain all their sins below par, at the expense of the widow and orphaned. Pam, knowing nothing of this moral stock-and-share market, was paying for her shares with everything that she possessed. To the last penny of her self-respect she was paying for them. Of all moral and conscientious coinage she was void and bankrupt. There was nothing left her now but the body she lived in--all its beautiful furnishment of soul had been distrained and bundled out by the bailiffs long ago. And the body was mortgaged.

For this marriage--that to the Spawer looked but a callous flaunting of her bliss before his stricken eyes, a cruel demonstration of how little she was dependent upon him for any share of her happiness in life--what was it but a foreclosure? She who had preached the gospel of true love, of the necessary unity of the body and the soul in marriage; who had proclaimed to Ginger that "there must be no chance about it, Ginger! ..." she who above all girls knew a love as free of carnality as any earthly love can be--she was selling her body now for its price.

Would she ever forget the night of horror that saw the compact made. The lonely, dusty highroad to Hunmouth, with its wide grass borders sloping down to the ditch bottoms, between the trimmed, stunted hedgerows, where the schoolmaster led her; the rising moon; the sickly, suffocating mist of harvest; the dim stars. And there, backward and forward over the powdery road, she had fought that last fateful fight for her soul's freedom--and failed.

Give her the letter back ... only give her the letter back ... and she would try to love him in earnest. She would force herself to love him. This time she should not fail. Give her the letter back. It was not his; it was not hers. Come with her himself if he doubted, and see her hand it in at Dixon's door. She swore she would give it. He did not understand. It had been all a mistake. She had not meant to take it. If he only knew the horror she had felt of herself. Oh, she promised! she promised!

But the man would have no promises. She had made him promises before and broken them. Here was the letter--here in his possession--and here it should remain, for witness against her, if need be, until the thing was settled. Let her call him what she would now; abuse him as she liked; hate him--all was one. This night she must let it be proclaimed in the family that they were plighted. As soon as Father Mostyn returned, she must plead for them both with him. Not until she had pledged herself publicly beyond all prospect of withdrawal would he give the letter up. Promises availed nothing. He was done with promises. If she would not accept him on these terms it was a plain proof that she did not mean to fulfil them, and unless she was prepared to fulfil them she must abide by the consequences.

And more tears; and more entreaties; and pitiable shows of rebellion, quickly subdued; and petty resistances; and tortured turnings to and fro over the road; and at last surrender.

At last surrender!

Death even, had death been his condition, she would have accepted sooner than this dire alternative. Only one idea possessed her now--that the Spawer should never know the presumption of her love.

But the letter! Till he got that ... he would not go at all. The longer its restitution was delayed, the longer must she endure her agony.

Strange reversal of misery. In the beginning she had suffered with the sickness of his going. Now, in the end, she suffered doubly with the sickness that he should stay. Of a truth, she was snared in her own wicked net. The sin that she had committed against him was turned into an all-sufficing punishment more than meet for the offence. And when would she be able to ease her pain in delivering the letter?

She did not know. Since that night of shameful surrender no further mention of the letter had passed between these two guilty partners, and because of the cruel mercy at which this man held her she would ask him nothing. To appeal to him respecting his intentions respecting her--to inquire of my lord's pleasure, as though she were a bond slave, purchased with gold ... no, no, she could not! When he deemed the time ripe to return her his ill-gotten seal of authority--once it had stamped the bond to his service--let him do so, and she would take it. Till then, let them both keep silence respecting their compact.

Hardly a word, indeed, passed between them on any topic. And by trifling, wordless actions the schoolmaster tightened his hold upon the girl's shrinking muscles, and held her to him as in a vice. Mere little attentions of courtesy they were, for the most part, that the household regarded--and kept watch for--with significant looks to one another, seeing in them the pleasant ripples on the seductive surface of true love--but to the girl they were but bolts being driven home, one by one, into the padlocked door of her prison. For she was this man's prisoner in thought, word, and deed. Whenever she moved, he moved with her. If she hid herself from him in her bedroom, be sure he was keeping safe guard over its door from his own. If she changed rooms, he was after her like thought. In all except the derision of the outer world she was a felon, convicted, imprisoned, and under close surveillance; unworthy a grain of trust or credence. When he handed her an apron, or helped her into her mackintosh, she felt the act as keenly as though she were being given a gaol garb to wear. Oh, the degradation of it all! lacking only the degradation of men's eyes. But for that one pair of eyes which held her to her purpose, she would rather have gone to a real prison than suffered this horrible incarceration. And yet, it was plain to see, the man was only doing his best to gain her love. He had trapped her like a bird, cruelly, no doubt; but now that she was his, and caged, he was ready to whistle to her, to give her sugar; gild her captivity the best he knew how. Her love to him was like the lark's song; he had snared her for that, and counted on hearing her sing to him. Once she was his, and he would save her life with his own if it might be. But meanwhile, teaching her and taming her, he made sure that the cage was secure; passed his fingers feverishly over its wires a hundred times a day to assure himself that he had overlooked no loophole for her escape. There were letters for Ullbrig during those days of rain, and he proffered to take them in the girl's stead. With a rain like that there was nothing to be feared. But the girl would not. To his cruelty she had had to submit, but to his kindness never. So they went, the two of them--for though he could venture to leave her behind, he dared not be the one left--battling through the downpour beneath mackintoshes and umbrellas, with their heads down, the whole roadway apart, exchanging never a word. And Ullbrig, safe at home, behind its starched curtains, saw the letters come thus, and smiled.

Truly, many waters cannot quench love.

Sunday--that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday, that seemed like the climax of the girl's shame, when to her horror she had found the Spawer in his pew beneath her; bless Heaven for the timely storm that kept them apart--Sunday came and went.

Monday replaced it; a promiseful, rainless day. All the sky was heaped up with great broken masses of cloud from yesterday's storm, that a persistent warm breeze swept over the cliff edge and across the sea, in ceaseless waves of sunlight and shadow. Throughout the day figures were moving about the fields, turning the limp and soddened sheaves to catch the wind. Still the breeze blew, and the countless host of clouds--like another Exodus of the Children of Israel--passed steadily over the land from the west to the east; to the brink of the sea and beyond. By evening they were nearly all gone over. Only detached bands of them here and there rode up silently from the great west, as though they had been horsemen of a rear guard, and moved slowly across the sky in the wake of that mighty passage. And as the last of these departed, the sun, like a great priest garbed in glorious gold vestments, rose to his height on the far horizon with arms extended to Heaven, and pronounced a benediction over the land.

Rest in peace now, oh, Ullbrig farmers! Have no fear, oh, faint-hearted tillers of the soil! Rejoice, ye harvesters, for the Lord God of the harvest-field is come into His own again. The corn shall ripen in the ear; there shall be reaping, binding, and gleaning, and an abundant return for all your labors.

That same night, while the land lay still under the sacred hush of that benediction, in the little front parlor, all flushed glorious with the exultation of the sun's message, the schoolmaster returned to Pam what, on just such as evening as this--millions of ages ago, in some remote epoch of the world's history--he had taken from her.

Not a word accompanied the restoration. In silence the girl's hand went forth--with not even her own eyes watching its shameful errand--to meet it and receive that precious, hateful pawn that she was redeeming with her body. For some seconds they stood, maintaining their respective attitudes in that surreptitious transfer; the man with bent head and averted gaze as he had given; the girl with high, rebellious bosom for a great grief, and her chin shrinking in the nest of it, while the recipient hand at the back of her worked slowly downward in the depths of her skirt-pocket.

Then suddenly, before the man had time to realise or utter the words his mind was slowly coining, the girl's high breast fell in the convulsion of silent sobs. With both hands pressed to her cheeks, and the tears streaming fast through her spread fingers, she brushed abruptly by him.

At the door, for he had something to say, he spoke her name and laid a restraining hand upon her shoulder, but she shook it off with the hateful shudder for a serpent, and passed swiftly from him up the Sunday staircase.

*CHAPTER XXXV*

All throughout the rest of that evening the schoolmaster had employment in guarding Pam's bedroom door. At times, drawing long breaths to suffocate his beating heart, he listened at its keyhole, applied his eye even, pressed his hot face flat against the woodwork, and strove to elicit some filterings, however attenuated, of its occupant and her concerns.

But the door was as uncommunicative as a gravestone. Had he not seen the girl go in, and heard her close the lock upon her entombment, he would have been sick with apprehension and doubt; ready to believe that she had eluded him, and that he had lost her. More than once, as it was, he tapped at the door, but no response came to him, and he was fearful to intensify the summons lest he might betray his presence to those downstairs, and bring about an enforced relinquishment of his watch.

Evening gave place to night, and the yellow harvest moon arose. Sounds of supper things stirring and searches after Pam drove him from the landing into his bedroom. Emma Morland, less timorous of knuckle than he, and less furtive of intention, came boldly up the staircase, calling Pam's name, and rapped--after finding the door locked--a peremptory summons upon its inmate.

"Come; what 'a ye gotten door fast for?" he heard her demand of the languid voice of response that had raised itself faintly at the summons, like a wounded bird. "Is n't it about time ye came doon an' gied a 'and wi' supper things? Ah 've yon blouse to finish by to-neet, think on."

Then the wounded voice stirred itself wearily again.

"What! another?" Emma Morland cried, with more of resentment in her tones than sympathy. "That meks second ye 've 'ad i' t' week. Ye nivver used to 'ave 'em. What 's comin' tiv ye?"

"Well! ah declare!" she exclaimed, after further parley of an apparently incomprehensible and unsatisfactory nature. "It 's a rum un when a lass like you starts tekkin' tiv 'er bed, 'at 's nivver knowed a day's illness in 'er life! There mun be seummut wrong wi' ye, ah think--a decline, or seummut o' t' sort. We s'll 'a to be fetchin' doctor tiv ye, gen ye get onny wuss. Will ye let me mek ye some bread-an'-milk? Some gruel, then? Some tawst an' tea? Ye weean't? Ye 're sure ... noo? Well, then; it 's no use. Ah 've done my best. Good-neet tiv ye, an' ah 'ope ye 'll be better i' t' morn. Don't trouble aboot gettin' up no sooner nor ye feel fit. 'Appen ye 'll sleep it off."

So she was safe in bed, then. Through the sorrow his love felt at the unhappiness in which it had involved the girl--for love it was--nothing short of love, and great love at that, could have moved this nervous, self-secluded man to such courageous acts of infamy--he drew relieved breath at the intelligence. Now he could relinquish the closeness of his vigil without fear.

He would have followed Emma Morland down the staircase with less ease of mind, perhaps, could he have seen the dressed figure of the girl, curled up on the quilt, with her face plunged in the pillows; and been able to follow the fevered hurryings of her thought. For the languid, wing-wounded voice he had heard was but a lie, like all the rest of her in these days. It was no headache she had--heartache, if you like--but no headache. What her seclusion sought was thought, not oblivion; action, not restfulness.

With the letter back at her breast again, all was undone once more. The door of the last few days seemed opened, as with a key. With this restored to her, and in her arms, all her courage came back; all her old steadfastness and fortitude; the blinded eyes of her spirit seemed opened. This very night, while the household slept, she should steal forth--as she had stolen forth in that first early dawn of her happiness--and make restitution of the letter. Under the door by the porch, or in at that familiar window--if only it were left unfastened--she should slip it. And with this letter must go a second--that she would write--making full confession of the offence, and humbling herself before him for his pardon and forgiveness. No longer did she desire to be clad in his presence with the garments of hypocrisy. Let him look upon her in the nakedness of her sin, for her soul's true chastening. Let nothing be hid from him. Rather now his proper scorn and loathing than his ill-gotten favor, as her unrighteousness had once sought to retain it. For his favor was no more hers, at this time, than the letter she held. Both had been gained by hypocrisy and fraud. Both must be restituted for the completion of her atonement.

And then her soul, walking forward with face glorious, saw the atonement done ... and passed beyond ... and stopped.

After the atonement.... What?

Lord have mercy on her! What?

Should she come back to this house, return to this bed, go on living this life of shame and dishonor, give herself ultimately into the arms of this man? Should she celebrate the sacrament of atonement this night, only to enter upon a fresh course of unrighteousness to-morrow?

Oh, no, no, no! She could not. A thousand times no! She could not.

By fraud he had got her. By cruelty he had broken her resistance. If she were going to pay openly for her sin, by just atonement before the proper tribunal, why need she pay a hundredfold in secret to this unrighteous extortioner? What she had undertaken to do she had done. She had bound herself by no promises, for he would not accept them from her. She had tied herself to him publicly, and pleaded with Father Mostyn as though she had been pleading for her life's blood; had submitted to the degradation of this man's authority ... only for the letter that she held. Rather than give herself up to him she would cast herself over the cliff and seek refuge in death.

And so thought ran on with her, and the further it traveled the further it seemed to take her away from the scene of her guilt and the man who had wronged her.

Yes, slowly but surely--as though, all along, it had been aware of its destination, and kept it only from the girl herself--her mind, traveling over its miles and miles of railed purpose, arrived at this dark terminus. She would go.

She wept when she saw at last where it was she must alight, and said good-by to herself as to a dear friend. But the parting was inevitable, and weeping, she bowed to it. To pour new wine of life into this old burst bottle of hers, how could she? Without open proclamation of the truth, her life in Ullbrig would but be days and hours and minutes of wicked, unbearable deception. But in a new place, away from the old sin and the old temptation, she might better succeed. She could never be happy again; that she knew. Happiness was gone from her for ever, but she could be good. Goodness should be her adopted child, in place of the one she had lost. The Spawer was good; like him she would try--oh, how patiently--to be.

Maddest of madness. The girl thought she was arriving at it all by processes of reason; she was merely delirious. Grief had been a five-days' fever with her, and this was the crisis. But there were no kind hearts to understand her sickness; no gentle hands to restrain her. Delirium, that she took to be reason, dictated "Go," and she was going.

Vague dreams of vague work in vague towns blew through her comprehension, like drifting mists from the sea. She would go here; she would go there; she would get work as a dressmaker; as a cook; as a clerk in some other post office; as a secretary ... as God knows what.

Night drew on as she fashioned her plans. One by one the familiar sounds acquainted her exactly with the progress of it. In the darkness of her pillow, before the moon got round to her window, she needed no clock. She heard the clatter of pottery; "good-nights" exchanged in the kitchen; creaking of the twisted staircase to the postmaster's stockinged feet, with the hollow bump of his hands as he steadied his ascent; the amiable gasping of Mrs. Morland, gathering up her forepetticoats and laboring in the wake of her husband's ascent; the unutterable sound of the schoolmaster's footsteps, that sent pangs through her, each one, as though he were treading all the way on her heart; the cruel catch of his bedroom door, so hard, remorseless, and sinister. In such wise he had shut the door of his compassion on her soul's fingers, and heeded not. And last of all, the sounds of bolts shot beneath; journeyings of Emma to and fro between the two kitchens. Now she would be extinguishing the lamp; now she would be lighting her candle; now she would be putting the kitchen lamp back for safety on the dresser by the wall; now she would be coming upstairs ... ah! here she came. The flickers of her candle winked momentarily in the keyhole of Pam's door, as though she were listening at the head of the staircase to gather assurance of her sound repose. Then the keyhole closed its blinking eye, and there ensued the click of Emma's own latch.

At that last culminating sound, Pam's heart turned palpitatingly within her, part exultant, part terrified; seemed almost to come into her mouth like a solid materialised sob. Now all the path was clear. Its clearness dismayed her. Soon slumber would prevail over the post-house, and act sentinel to her purpose. But though purpose, standing like a bather by the brink of wintry waters, shivered at the prospect of immersion--yet did not falter. Purpose had vowed to go, and purpose was going. Another hour the girl kept stillness upon her bed, and the half of an hour after that, listening until the rhythmic _ronflement_ of the postmaster's snore was established, and the intervals between that horrible menaceful cough--short at first--had spaced themselves out into ultimate silence. Then from her bed she rose.

Stealthily, seated on the side of it, she unlaced her shoes and laid them on the quilt, that her feet might be noiseless upon the floor. Then, letting the weight of her body slide gradually on to the rug by the side of her bed, she moved forward, balancing with outstretched hands. The clear beams of the moon filled her white bedroom by this time, as though it were day. And now that the actual moment of flight was upon her, its keen, constricted space in eternity acted like a pin-hole lens, through which, magnified, she saw the difficulties of her task.

What, in the nature of personalty, should go with her? She would have need of her bath, of her big sponge, of her toothbrushes, of her dentifrice and powder, of her brushes and comb, of her night-gowns, of her dressing-gown, of changes of underlinen, of her blouses, of her best dress, of her Sunday shoes, of her walking-boots, of pocket-handkerchiefs ... these only concerning her toilette.

And she would have need of her mother's books, and her own little library; her own little stock of French grammars and easy reading books; the music that he had given her ... heaps and heaps of precious, inconsiderable gifts and souvenirs that in this hour of severance her soul clung to tenaciously, as to dear, human fingers.

Alas! of such latter, it seemed, she had none to cling to.

But all these things she could not convey with her. Flight could not hamper itself with baths and books, and boots and blouses. All that hindered it must be cast aside. And these things ... the only trifling landmarks in life to remind her who she was, and what small place she held in the great waste of existence ... these must be cast aside too.

These must be cast aside!

What a severance!

How would her soul know itself without these familiar tokens? Without these, without Ullbrig, away in strange places, in strange surroundings, she might be anybody. She was no longer Pam. She was simply a life ... an eating and a drinking; a sleeping and a waking. She wept.

Stealthily withal, but bitterly, and without any abatement of her purpose, like a child weeping its way to school, that never dreams of contesting the destiny that drives it there.

Yes; all these dear things of her affection must be left behind. For the present, at least. But they were not robbers in this house; they were honest people, who had loved her in the past, and been kind to her. They would guard these things for her, and if some day she wrote to them and asked as much, they would cede them to her without demur. Only what she positively needed must she take with her. A night-dress, her tooth-brushes, her sponge (that, at least, would squeeze up), a collar or two, some stockings, one change of linen, one brush and comb, one extra pair of shoes. Just such a parcel as she could carry without causing too much fatigue to herself, or too much comment from others. And she would need money.

How much had she?

In her purse she had four shillings, sixpence, and coppers; in the pocket of her old serge skirt, three half-pence. Five shillings odd to face the world with. Oh, it was very little!

But in an old chocolate box she had one pound ten shillings in gold, and a fat five-shilling piece--all her recent savings; the proceeds of little works for his Reverence, and dressmaking assistance for Emma. From various parts of her bedroom, she gathered all the items necessary for her outfit and essayed upon her most terrible enterprise of all--the descent of the staircase.

Slowly, slowly, slowly ... oh, agonisingly slowly ... she turned the handle of her door and opened it upon its hinges. In those early days she had done this same thing--with trepidation, indeed, and compression of lip--but never with the blanched horror of to-night. To stumble now, or betray herself; to arouse the house to her flight, and be caught disgracefully in the act--with nothing but shame and exposure as recompense for her anguish--that must not be. And yet all the boards cried out upon her, sprang up, as though she had startled them sleeping, and called: "Pam! Pam! What! is it you? Where are you going, Pam?" And she dared not hush them.

And the wooden walls, when she laid a guiding hand upon them, rocked and yielded to her weight; it seemed they must inevitably shake the sleepers on their beds. And the stairs--treacherous stairs--each one of them tried to betray her; promised fair to her foot, and called out when she confided to them her body: "Noo then; noo then! where 's ti gannin' to this time o' neet? Mester Morland! Mester Frewin! y' ought to be stirrin' alive noo! There 's this lass o' yours away seumweers wi' a bundle o' claws [clothes]." Oh, the slow sickness of it; step by step, foot by foot, stop by stop, rigid as a statue, cold of heart as of clay, burning of head, tingling of ears. But at last her feet found the friendly kitchen mat, solid on the red-tiled floor.

Long, standing there, she listened, panting and sifting the overhead silence for the slightest sound that might betide discovery of her flight. But none could she catch, though the meshes of her hearing were drawn painfully fine. The worst of her task was over. Now were only a few concluding things to do ... and then the going.

The moon filled the little clean kitchen and the kitchen parlor--all this back part of the house, indeed--with its great white beams, as it had filled her bedroom upstairs, and gave her no need of lamp or candle. Speedily moving over the red tiles in her noiseless stockinged feet, she acquired her few remaining necessaries from drawer and cupboard, made up her effects into as neat a parcel as they would let her, put on her old, faded, blue Tam-o'-Shanter, laid her brown mackintosh ulster on the dresser, and got ready her thick-soled walking shoes. Now she had only a little writing to do, and she could be gone. First of all, with her tears intermittently running, she must write her letter to Him. And she must write also to Emma Morland. And a line must be left for the postmaster, and one for Mrs. Morland, and a farewell to the man upstairs, who had wrought this havoc with her life. And Father Mostyn ... he must not be left in ignorance. And James Maskill too ... poor hallowed James, who looked so sadly at her in these days; and Ginger. At this sad hour of her parting, her heart wished to make its peace with all against whom it had offended; all that had offended it; all that had showed it kindness. To everybody that had given her a good word or a bad she felt the desire to leave a little epistolary farewell. But she could not write to them all now. Later, perhaps. To do so would be to keep her hand at work with the pen till daybreak, and now every moment was of importance. Ullbrig would be early abroad to-morrow. Eyes would be scanning the earth from every quarter long before sunrise. Not the most that her heart wished to do now, but the least, for her purpose, that it might, must be her rule. She would write to the Spawer; he, at least, must be written to. And to Father Mostyn, and to the schoolmaster, and a word to Emma.

So deciding, she got pen and paper and ink, and set herself to this final task in the broad white band of moonlight over the window table.

With writhings, with fresh tears, with bitings of the pen, with painful defections of attention to the regions upstairs, in the flood of clarid moonlight, she coped with her labor. But at last that too, like all suffering in the world, had an end. The letter was written and sealed. And next, more fluently, was penned the epistle for his Reverence; and succeeding that, her farewell to the schoolmaster; and her sorrowing penitence to Emma. The first two she gathered to herself; the second two she left, displayed on the table, to be found of their respective addressees in the morning.

And now she was on the brink of departure. All her work in this house had been accomplished except the mere leaving of it. She had looked upon this as easy, by comparison, but how truly hard it was. Dear little kitchen, that swam away from her eyes as she gazed upon it--like a running stream under the moonlight. So the glad current of her past was racing from her. Dear little blurred dresser--friend of hers from her childhood upward. She stooped her lips to it on an impulse, and kissed its hard, scarred cheek again and again, in one last sacred farewell. Never more, perhaps, should her eyes rest upon it. Dear little warm-hearted oven, that had done her so many good turns in the past. Sometimes, perhaps, it might have been a little too short with her tarts, and a shade crusty with her pies--a little hot-tempered with herself even, but that was nothing. What were its faults by the side of hers! She held its round, bright knob in a lingering grasp. "Good-by, little oven.... Oh, little oven, good-by! Do your duty better than I have done mine ... and take profit by me. Be kind to Emma ... and Mrs. Morland ... for my sake ... and brown your very best."

And to the little fender also, her soul said good-by; and to the lamp that had lighted so many nights of her happiness in the great agone; and to the brass boiler tap; and to the warming-pan. All over the house she would have liked to wander, raining her mild, sorrowful tears ... and saying her spiritual good-bys to these dear, inanimate friends of her vanished happiness; but it might not be. Into her mackintosh she stole at length--that rustled like marsh flags, for all her care--slipped on her shoes, gathered up her parcel, and passed out of the kitchen on cautious tip-toe. But a few more moments and she had renounced the comfortable roof of red tiles that had made so pleasant a shelter over her head these years past. Now there intervened no shield between that dear head and the stern, starry sky; so severely calm and clear and dispassionate. No hope from there, dear child, though you lift your lips to it and invoke its mercies. Others too, as tender--though not more fair--have confided themselves so, and sunk in the great world's ocean beneath these self-same stars.

And thus, with one long, drenched, searching gaze of tears, sideways up the wall of the house that had held her, good-night and good-by!

*CHAPTER XXXVI*

The schoolmaster, never a sound sleeper at the best of times, this night slept his worst. Being but a novice in practical iniquity, and lacking yet the reposeful assurance that lulls the veteran evil-doer upon his pillow, and gives him slumber unknown of the godly, who have consciences to lie upon their breast like lobster, he tossed hotly between his sheets. Sleep came to him, indeed, but it was a troubled sleep, blown across his mind's sky in fitful patches, like the clouds that had scudded seawards over the land this day, and gave him no repose.

Thoughts, like teetotums, spun too fast for the mind's eye to recognise the figures on them. But always the basis of his delirium was Pam; the ceaseless desire of her possession; his love of her; his remorse of the evil that had been done to get her; her horror of him that his act had inspired in her; wild resolutions to atone to the girl for his past iniquity by his future dedication to her worship; to justify the means by the end, and make her bless him at last for the sin that had brought them together.

So his mind was spinning on its unchecked dizzy orbit in space through the hours, like a star through the centuries, when all at once, with a shock that shuddered him from head to foot, some unseen power arrested its flight as with an omnipotent hand, and left him wide-eyed and wakeful on his bed; no star at all now, but the bed-bound, trembling body of a man, filled with sudden fear and apprehension.

What had happened? Had his being just wrested itself from the bonds of a horrid nightmare? Had he been dreaming or thinking when the shock came? He could remember nothing, whether it had been dream or reflection, to which he could attribute the alert horror of this moment. It had dropped upon him from somewhere without himself; as though it had been a mighty, soundless peal of thunder, shaking his soul to its foundations. His thoughts he could recall with equanimity; there was nothing in them to cause him fear--and still fear filled him, the more greatly for having not form nor expression. Fear, or apprehension, filled him to such extent that the cold, tingling fingers of terror crept up his scalp, from neck to forehead, brushing all his hairs the wrong way; and a great, boiling sweat burst out next moment upon his face and body. So men have been made aware at times of the doings of death, and the schoolmaster, recalling cases of the kind, drew himself up palpitatingly in his bed. On the cane-bottomed chair by the head of it, it was his nightly custom to set his candle, which he thus extinguished, with a hand thrust out from between the sheets. Thrusting out the same hand now, he possessed himself, in agitated haste, of the match-box, struck nervously for a light with the match's unphosphorused end, and with the red tip of phosphorus on the unsand-papered side of the box; and lastly, after much work of the sort, drew into existence a fitful, wavering flame, that died in giving light to the candle. Then he pulled forth his watch by its chain from under the pillow, and holding it out from him, fixed a disturbed eye upon its face. Half-past twelve.

Half-past twelve! No more than that! Ages he seemed to have been battling with the fever of thought. Could the watch be true? He pressed it to his ear, and heard the active click-click, click-click heart go beating in its busy little body. It had not stopped then. It spoke the truth.

He replaced it under the pillow, and remained drawn up in bed, with both arms outstretched on the coverlet, as though debating action--though what to do, or what might be supposed to be required of him, he knew not. His heart, thumping against his ribs, gave abundant evidence that he had been rudely roused--if otherwise he had had any inclination to doubt. And there was the relaxed weakness about his legs, too, and his limp arms, that bore witness to the sharpness of the shock. Had the shock come upon him standing, his first instinct would have led him to sit down. Over and over in his mind he kept turning this awakening like a strange, unknown coin, seeking to find some decipherable superscription upon it, and learn what it might presage. It had come upon him suddenly. It was like to a clap of thunder without noise; the boom of a gun; the slam of a door. Something whose sound he had not heard, but whose shock had stirred him. Yet all he could think of was death. Somebody was dead; somebody was dying; somebody was going to die. To such extent did the idea of death possess him that it seemed to expire from him like a mighty stream, whose fount was in his brain. The whole room was filled with the awesome presence of it. Death was at the bed-foot; at the window curtain; shrouded the candle. And then, of a sudden, thoughts of death and thoughts of the girl, circling round each other, came into horrible collision, and commingled, and lo! death and the girl were one.

In his guilty state of mind, he was an easy prey for terror. He tried to rid himself of the idea with a hundred assurances drawn from pure reason. How could she be dead? She had never died before ... why should she die now? She was sleeping safely in her own bed, not four yards from him. Draw a bee-line through the wall at his head, through the landing beyond, and through the wall of the girl's room, and there she should surely be. Only last night he had been speaking to her; hardly more than four hours ago he had heard her voice. Death could not have come to her so soon. The idea was nonsense. But like a child, terrorised by things unseen, that the wisdom of grown-up logic cannot pacify, the more he reasoned the more his unreasonment grew. For all this ill-gotten authority over her that he had been wielding so unmercifully these days past ... to what might it not have driven her? Desperately he listened--with his face turned toward the wall--as though death were a thing audible, like the tick-tacking of the big clock in the passage below. But the tick-tacking of the big clock, and the irregular thudding of his own heart, and the long-drawn snores of the postmaster, were all that he could hear. This trinity of sounds hung like a creaking door before his hearing. He was sensible of a deep and deadly silence beyond, flowing like the sea of eternity; but despite his desperate fishing, he could draw up nothing from its depths. Last of all, wrought to the supreme pitch of suspense, he threw aside his coverings, slid from the bed, and stole across the room towards the door--a miserable figure of inquietude in his thin, bare legs and short scholastic night-gown, that took him pathetically somewhere by the bone of the knee. Again, at the door itself he listened for a while, trying to cancel those three intrusive factors--the snore, the clock, and his own heart--and base his calculations on the silence beyond; but he could not. If he would gain any reassurance for his disquieted spirit, he must go forth and inquire deeper of the surrounding stillness than this.

And he went forth, and saw the moonlight bathing all the landing through the little staircase window and issue idly in a pale, phosphorescent stream round the three sides of the girl's part-opened door.

Like a wide-mouthed statue of horror, he stood marble in the white moonlight and stared. Her door was open; her door that had been closed and locked upon her last night was open now--open so emptily and with such desolation, while the moonlight flowed placidly through it, like sea-water through the hollow hulk of a submerged vessel--that it seemed as if never it could have held the live, blood-warmed body of the girl. For a moment, the shock of what he saw was twin to the shock of what--so short a while back--he had failed to see. Then in his little, wasted cotton night-dress and his bare legs as he was, he started forward into action, pushed open the panels unhesitatingly with his fingers, and entered.

All to itself the moonlight possessed the room; filled it from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner. There was no girl. Her bed had been merely laid upon from the outside; she had not slept in it. There was her night-dress untouched in its embroidered case. Except for the callous, white moonlight, that showed him these things without a thought for his anguish, the room was empty as a sieve. The girl had gone; gone where and why and when, he could not tell. Whether with thoughts of death, or thoughts of flight, or thoughts of treachery--he could not tell. The discovery flew to his head like the vintage of bitter grapes. He searched madly about the room; threw up the white valances of her bed, lest perchance she were but hiding from him; opened her cupboards and beat his hands wildly among the darkness of skirts and hanging garments for some clasp of fugitive flesh and blood; part shut the door to assure himself she was not lurking behind its hinges, with her face in her hands and her forehead against the wall.

But she was not. He knew she was not when he searched. She was gone! she was gone!

And thence, with his thin, worn, calico lapels blowing about his legs, he scurried down the twisted staircase to see what the lower regions had to show him.

As soon as his feet flinched on the bristles of the fibre mat, they showed him all that they had to show. The two letters spread out side by side on the window table, white as driven snow in the moonlight. It needed no slow investigation to assure him what they were. Gravestones did not more certainly indicate what lay beneath them than did these two pallid envelopes. He was on them at once, like a hawk. "To Mr. Frewin," he read on the first, in Pam's neat, well-known script, and ripped it open regardlessly, as though he were gutting herrings. So did his heart beat at him from within, and so did his brain contract and swell, and so did his apprehensive hand tremble, that for some seconds the piece of paper, for all the words he distinguished on it, might have been a white, waving flag. But in the end he got control over himself, and wrested the girl's last message to him from the paper on which, to all intents and purposes, it was scarcely dry.

"When you get this..." he read. Ah! that familiar, time-worn overture for stricken messages of grief. How many miserables, by water-sides, by lone lochs, by canals, reservoirs, and railways, have prefaced their journey to eternity with these four words. Scarcely a suicide so unliterary that, at this last moment, he cannot call them to his aid for epitaph to his misery. As soon as the schoolmaster read them, he knew all. Death or departure ... this was the end.

"... When you get this" (he read), "I shall be far away from Ullbrig, and you will know why. If you had done differently with me, I might have done differently with you. But it is too late now for regrets. After the sin you have forced me to share with you, I could never, never love you. The future frightens me. For all you have made me suffer I forgive you freely, but I pray God we may never meet again. I have been as wicked as you, and for this reason I dare not join our wickednesses, for fear of where they may lead us. Please forgive me for the things in which I have sinned against you, and beg God to forgive us both for the things we have done against Him. Pray for me too, as I will pray for you. Perhaps your life may be all the brighter and better for my absence. Strive to do your best that it may be so; and please remember, if at any time you are tempted to think hardly upon me, that I am not angry with you, and that I do not blame you. Good-by for ever. PAM."

That was all the letter told him--but it was enough. His face was like the face of a snow-man when he had finished reading. Not only was he smitten to the heart with the lost love of the girl, after all his lavish outlay of unrighteousness and sin, but now she was gone, and he was here in Ullbrig to bear the brunt of his deed. For he had no misconceptions as to his true position in the matter, as Pam had. He knew his conduct for what it was, and his hold over her for what it was, and the world's judgment for what it would be. Her very going was a declaration of the thing he had held over her in his wickedness, and would have never dared employ. The worthless blackmail with which he had threatened her had served its purpose only too well. To such extent had the girl believed its power and feared it, and accredited him with the intentions of its use, that she had been terrorised into flight from him. And now the full responsibility of his act pointed at him with awful finger. To-morrow, tidings of the girl's departure would be out. Tongues would be busy. She who had been going to wed the schoolmaster had loved him so little that she had fled from him. Why had she fled from him? Because he had held a letter over her head that he had robbed from her desk--a letter belonging to neither of them--and by withholding it from its proper owner, and threatening the girl, he had got her to submit to his terms. When once that became known he was a ruined man. His love was ruined; his life was ruined. The death that had so terrorised him already must have been none other than his own. For rather than face this terrible exposure and degradation, he would die. He was a wild and desperate man now, holding the slipping cable of life and honor in his hands. To avert this catastrophe, to find the girl--at scarcely anything would he stop short. But what must he do? Where seek her? How act?

To cast his eye on the second letter was to seize upon it as he had done the first, and tear open its contents without a moment's hesitation. Emma Morland would never know what had been left for her this night, and beneath this envelope there might lurk a confession of the whole history of the girl's departure, with his own share writ incriminatingly large; at the least, some word or sentence that might give him a clearer clue to her intentions than her own letter to him. But he was disappointed. Beyond beginning: "Dearest Emma," this second epistle told him nothing that he consumed to know. It was a mere farewell of sorrow for all the sin Pam had committed against Emma, particularly during these last few days, and a pathetic begging for forgiveness. Emma did not know how unhappy Pam had been--Pam hoped Emma would never, never know such unhappiness. She was not the girl Emma thought her. She was a living lie, full of wickedness and deception. The only thing for her to do, she felt, was to blot out such a horrible lie from the face of Ullbrig and be gone. Then followed assurances of undying love to Emma, and to the postmaster and to Mrs. Morland, with a list of such things as Pam bequeathed to Emma for her own use and possession. To all intents and purposes, it was Pam's last will and testament, pathetically worded enough, had the man been in any mood for pathos other than his own. To the postmaster, Pam left this; to Mrs. Morland, that; to James Maskill, the other; to Ginger--if he would have it--some further token of her affection. Only the schoolmaster's name was absent. And at the end was Pam's own name, blurred and spotted with the tears that had fallen fast at this juncture.

But for these the man had no heed. He had read the letters, and they had told him nothing; now he must decide quickly, as he valued his life.

And first, he could accomplish nothing as he was. The remembrance of his ungarbed condition came upon him suddenly, and he cursed himself for his bodily unreadiness--although his mind had as yet no commission for his limbs to execute. Up the twisted staircase he pattered again, employing his hands on the steps in front of him like paws, to accelerate his pace, and thrust himself wildly into his clothes. Then he scurried down again to the little kitchen. There he sorted his own boots from the disorderly gathering for the morning's clean, strapped up their leather laces with the speed of desperation, stuffed the two letters into his coat pocket, caught a cap from the row of pegs where the postmaster's official regalia hung, and scuffled down the passage to the front door.

There was no mistaking signs of the girl's flight, or the way by which she had fled. For him there was no necessity to work back the big square bolt, or turn the traitorous key. Pam's fingers had done that service already. He was out in the street with scarcely a moment's delay, on the whitewashed step where Pam's own feet had rested less than fifteen minutes ago--could he only have known--closing the door upon him by stealth, as she had done, and looking up and down the roadway, divided lengthways between its far white band of moonlight and its nearer black shadow, with its serrated line of broken roofs and chimney-pots--like the keyboard of a piano--as she had looked before her purpose made its final plunge.

Which way had she gone? he asked himself, in frenzied supplication. For all he knew, she had been gone an hour, a couple of hours, three hours ... four hours. Even now, while he was making this vein-bursting struggle to come abreast with her and stave off that awful exposure of to-morrow, it might all be ended. Destiny might have this shameful history written to the full in the book of record, and the book inexorably closed. Perhaps the girl's purpose had been maturing all these days past. Perhaps her plan had been prepared from the first ... and in abeyance, pending restitution of the letter. Fool that he was ever to give it! Why had n't he adhered to his first project, and given it to her only when they were in sight of the house, and he was with her, or left it there himself by night, with a message that it had been overlooked in a corner of the post-bag? Now what had she done with it? Had she restored it? That would mean the Cliff Wrangham road she must have taken. Or had she fled with it, bearing all traces of her guilt with her? That might mean any road ... the Hunmouth road, the Garthston road, the Merensea road. Or had she gone to cast herself upon the protection of the Vicar? Accursed old busybody! who had drilled and questioned and cross-examined him about the wedding like a school-thief under suspicion. There was probability about this latter surmise, and at least, to put the speculation to the test would not take him far out of his way. Full of the wild, unrestrained desire to do something, with tumultuous, incredulous hope in the desire, he quitted his place on the doorstep, and set off in madman's haste for the Vicarage.

But the moon poured down in sublime, unpitying indifference upon its unlighted windows. The house was as still and unawake as the church at its side and the white graves beyond. Baffled, he stood and glared hatefully, with his hands twitching about the upturned collar of his coat, and his face working as though the house were human and he would have throttled it. Of all men in the world to help him, here, behind these luminous opal windows, was the man, and he knew it, and was powerless to evoke his assistance, grinding his teeth together in the fierce agony of despair.

Motion took him in the legs again, and drove him down the narrow, crooked side-street towards the low road and Merensea Hill, between the rows of tumbled cottages, with their yellow window squares. He could have drummed on them with his fingers, and in his desperation and need of assistance would have done so, but fear withheld him. As he ran, he heard troubled night-coughs rap out sharp at him here and there, where some aged sufferer drew breath badly, and wrestled for such stagnant air as was contained in the sealed chamber. The buzzing of some big eight-day clock, too, chiming a belated hour, he heard, and the fretful crying of a baby, being lulled to sleep by its weary mother. Heaven knows where his run would have ended in this direction, for it was become so blended and amalgamated with his consciousness that he could have as soon stopped running as the feverish urging of his thoughts. But at the bottom of the street, where the road dips its lowest before making the sharp ascent of Merensea Hill, he saw the dark figure of a man, and death could not have stopped him sooner. It was only Bob Newbit, smoking his black cutty, with his hands in his belt, and a coat thrown over his shoulders, come out to watch over the fire of the brick-kiln that glowed red in the field across the roadway, but all men were one man in their power to read the schoolmaster's dark secret, and do him harm. He saw the burning end of the cutty turn his way, and without waiting to know whether he had been perceived, or give the chance of a hail, he turned on his tracks again like a hare, and was forging up the street through the square lighted windows towards the Vicarage.

This time, without stopping in his breathless course, he went by. One way was as good as another to him, who had no reason for going any. He would keep on to Cliff Wrangham.

At first, panting doggedly onward, he ran this way as he had run that. If his clothing had been on fire instead of his brain, like this he would have wildly run, seeking flight from the agony that consumed him.

But conviction came upon him as he ran. It seemed incredible he could be making all this desperate endeavor for nothing. It must surely end by repaying him with positive result. Little by little the mad, fitful uncertainty gave way to the madder flame of assurance. Of all madness, this fixed madness is the most to be feared. Now he was merely pursuing the girl, who was along here in front of him. At times, turning his ear before him as he lunged onward, he seemed to hear elusive footsteps; thought he saw her flitting aside into gateways and hedgerows to escape him. Once he staggered halfway across a grass close because, he saw her standing in the middle of it, trying to deceive him by her motionlessness into thinking her some inanimate thing. When he came near she was a pump-well. Then he saw that he had relinquished the substance for the shadow. She was on the roadway there, in advance of him; her skirts flying, her hands to her hat. And he lumbered back over the soft grass, soddened by the recent rain, to the roadway, and resumed his forward pursuit.

Full of fresh strenuous desire to press ahead, and worn out with this unaccustomed exertion, he passed, half running, half walking, with his hand bound over his heart, and his breath drawn up convulsively, like a child with the croup--through the final gateways, one after another. Now he was in the little end lane, making a poor pretence of caution. Now he waw by the stable; now he was by the iron wicket. The hope that had been his while he ran stopped dead as his flight stopped. By the little iron wicket, and still under cover of the kitchen-garden wall, he stayed, gasping, and dared not go further, or look at the front of the house, for fear of what he should see--the sight of all its moonlit windows looking out with the calm, self-communing gaze of the blind, that know nothing of what they gaze upon. As the Vicarage had faced him, so this house should face him. It was the end. He knew his doom.

And knowing it, he found strength to see, and saw.

*CHAPTER XXXVII*

Saw the magnified yellow window thrown over the pathway and out across the tangled grass to the mouldy green railings, from the Spawer's room. Here was life at last. Thank God! Here was life at last.

His heart gave a convulsive leap of exultation within him. Could it be mere coincidence that of all Ullbrig and Cliff Wrangham this man should be unnumbered among the sleepers? Could it be that the late light, flowing from that little low window beyond the porch, had no concern with his own misery and the girl's flight? He could not think it. Here was his journey's end. Let him take the girl red-handed in shame, if need be. Shame, even, counted for nothing in his love of her. Had she been dyed to the neck in iniquity he would have wished her, and followed to the world's end for her, without the lash of his own sin to whip up the pursuit.

Slowly, with his eyes fixed on the sidelight from that fateful window, he advanced; arms outspread for caution, doubling inwards from his middle at each step, and making a semi-circle upon the grass to get sooner and deeper sight into the room. All at once his eye cleared the obstruction of trailing porch, and he stopped here, as though to take in fresh supplies of cautious reserve and get leverage upon the position. Then, more laboriously he worked forward again; his head far in advance; his knees bent; his arms like a baboon's, extended to the ground--as though at an alarm he would clutch at the long grass and draw himself into its shelter. The piano-end came into view. Its keyboard of chequered ivory lengthened as he approached upon it; next he gained sight of the mantel-shelf; and last of all ... with his finger-nails clenched into his palms for self-repression ... the man.

He was seated on an end of the table, with his back towards the window, and appeared to be reading or scrutinising something beneath the powerful light of the big hanging lamp. What it was he bent his head over the schoolmaster could not see, but his acute, tormented vision saw something else that discharged itself at once in lightning of revelation through the whole length and breadth of his being, and blinded him for a moment with fierce, flashing passion and exultant joy. The room was heaped up under the confusion of a departure. There were books stacked together carefully on the table; music in fat portfolios; there were garments folded and unfolded; coats and trousers; boots on trees; and to give crowning evidence to his deduction, a big leather traveling portmanteau, open of lid, beyond the fireplace. Ah! was it any longer a coincidence, these two departures? Thank God he was in time. The Lord had not deserted him. It was the Lord that had brought him here this night.

Meanwhile, the Spawer kept his attitude, with bowed head of absorption beneath the lamp; and the man watched.

Yes; he was going. The schoolmaster had made no mistake. A child, looking in at the open window, would have declared as much. Of a truth, Maurice Ethelbert Wynne had had his last decisive bout with that big bully Destiny. No mistake about it, he had been badly beaten. All through the hours after supper he had been collecting his effects together; packing the big trunk down here, that it might be more easily conveyed to the spring cart on the morrow; packing the smaller portmanteau upstairs. Upstairs to-night for the most part his work had been, only quitting it at long intervals to bring down further contributions for the yawning leather trunk. And now, on this last occasion of his descent, he had been made aware, for the first time, that a couple of letters lay on the keyboard of the pianoforte, by the bass end, near the window.

At the beginning his eye had rested upon them, and accepted their presence as a matter of course, without any further inquiry or speculation, quite content with seeing them. It was a customary place for him to leave things of the sort, only he did n't remember having left anything there lately. By the way, what letters would they be? More out of idleness than real curiosity, he put out his hand and took them up.

The first, addressed to him in that firm, feminine handwriting--almost masculine--beneath a wealth of green stamps and postmarks, he recognised at a glauce. But it had not been opened. Strange that! Which of all her letters had escaped him like this? When had it come? How long had he overlooked it? Still asking himself the questions, he turned his eye upon the second letter. That too, was addressed to him in a handwriting he knew no less surely--though with less familiarity: the soft, neat, girl-like script of Pam, and that, too, must be unopened, for it was the first he had received from her. From Pam, of all people in the world. What had she to say to him? Perhaps this letter would explain the other. Very nervous of finger, he tore open the envelope.

A curious little letter it was, perplexingly short, that puckered up his brows and left him more puzzled after its perusal than before. It appeared to be, in some sort, a confession for an imaginary crime that the girl had committed--though wherein lay the enormity of it, or the necessity for this present epistle, not for the life of him could he perceive. Pam, indeed, whose own guilt was so vivid that a word was sufficient to depict it, had thought that the same word could reveal it to all the world. Her letter was like the answer to a riddle, with the question lacking. Apparently, the Spawer told himself, the girl had failed to deliver a letter--the letter accompanying this, he presumed--and it had preyed terribly upon her mind. He was to forgive her, as she felt sure he would forgive her if he could only know what suffering it had cost her. And then followed an outburst of affectionate gratitude for all the kindness he had lavished on her; his never-failing goodness and patience. These she should never forget. With a concluding appeal to him that he should try and think as leniently of her as he could.

Think as leniently of her as he could! Miserable topsy-turveydom of life, where all one's acts turn upside-down in the acting, and one's deeds misrepresent one with the deliberate purpose of political agents. Here he had been holding himself a supplicant upon the girl's mercy, and lo! all the while, it seemed their positions were exactly reversed, and it was she who imagined herself an offender against him! This letter of the girl's troubled him. Did it mean she had never been sure of his friendship? Did it mean she had altogether overlooked the signs in his conduct that should have told her he would have forgiven anything ... to her? Had all their relationship been built up of vain imaginings and misunderstandings? If ... for instance...

But he would have no more "ifs." Already he had had too many. What might have been and what was were as asunder as the Poles. Let him not revive the old unworthy desires under the cloak of If. What did the second letter say?

He opened it more slowly than the first--as though he felt a little the shame of going before its presence, and did not anticipate much happiness from this interview of pen and ink. But as he read, it seemed he could not tear his eyes away from their fascinating occupation. If Pam's letter had added cloud to his confusion, this letter was explicit indeed--and yet dazed him at the same time with an overwhelming sense of unreality.

The freedom that he had felt himself unable to ask of the Other Girl, in this letter she was asking of him. All the old stock-in-trade arguments of love that he had thought once of bringing to bear upon her, she was bringing to bear on him. Their attachment, she pointed out, was a mere boy-and-girl attachment, that had never taken deep root in their later lives. He had offered her her liberty once, but he would know that all her sense of loyalty had refused the gift at the time. But now it was different. Another stronger love had come into her life, and she would not disguise the fact from him--it had more to offer. She was not cut out for the wife of a composer. He would know that, really, without her telling him. She could never be helpful to him; never even give him the full measure of sympathy that the creative mind needed. In a word, love and worldly position had been laid together at her feet and she dared not proceed with this flat, stale attachment of theirs, that had neither reason nor riches. It was always a woman's privilege to change her mind, and she would avail herself of it to accept the liberty he had offered her before. Friends they had been, all this while--never lovers at all--and friends, she trusted, they would never cease to be. There was a little blot of tears at the end, a slight incoherence of phraseology in a sentimental reversion to their happy past ... but only slight--only very slight. Love had been dead between them long ago. She was reconciled to that. But this letter was its official funeral--and it is a strong woman whose tears can resist the appeal of a burying.

And this was the letter the Spawer read with face bent down, while the man outside kept watch.

No wonder he sat motionless on the corner edge of the table, as he had first seated himself, poring over that magnetising something that the watcher, for all his watching, could not see. For what did this letter mean to him? Nothing at all now, in hard fact, perhaps ... but yet ... what tantalising riches in speculation. Here were his trunks, and here was he, all ready for dutiful departure--and in his hands was the instrument of reprieve. His duty had been remitted him. From that duty he was free. Who should say what was his duty now? Had he a duty at all--to himself, or anybody? Or was he, by virtue of this relinquishment, become a mere jellyfish, without volition, to float this way or that at the mercy of the tides? What was there to take him from Ullbrig now? What was to keep him? If he stayed? If he went? If this letter had come sooner! If this letter had only come sooner!

And the whole thing began over again.

All the old fever of reasoning set in anew with him, and rose up to its height. All the old desires. All the old wild hopes. He had been tired when he came downstairs, less with physical fatigue than with the dull, sleepless lassitude of established despair--but now he was very wide awake. His eyes revolted at the thoughts of being closed perforce upon a pillow; they wanted license to keep open house for his brain all night through. Suddenly, too, came upon him the nervous appetite for activity; the desire to give a bodily articulation to the movement of his mind. He felt as though he could have set off, and walked the globe round, and been back again here by to-morrow's breakfast. And submitting to the feeling, he rose all at once from his place on the table, turned down the twin burners of the swing lamp, picked up his cap, squeezed his way out through the two doors and the narrow porch, and set off towards the sea.

He walked with a brisk, purposeful step, for the night was chill beneath the white moon and the many cool stars. Part way across Luke Hemingway's big ten-acre field, at a sudden turn of his head towards some recumbent, cud-chewing cattle, his eye-corner caught the tail-end of an upright figure, vanishing into the hedge at some distance behind him. There was nothing, of course, when he looked, to confirm the impression, beyond the clear-defined, moonlit path along which he had come. But his eye retained such an obstinate remembrance of its own delusion, that at a few yards further on, choosing his moment, he turned on his heel again. And again, strangely enough, his eye seemed to be just eluded by the vanishing figure of a man. Had he been nervously given, he might have felt tempted to walk back and scrutinise the hedgerow that had thus twice afforded refuge to his shadowy pursuant. But for one thing, his mind was too busy for nerves to-night, and knowing, moreover, the strange receptive sensitiveness of the human eye, and the assurance with which it attests, as realities, mere miraculous figments of the brain, he passed on--reserving the right to turn again when he had given his visual informant an opportunity to forget its impression.

After a longer interval, therefore, he looked back again, on the pretext of stooping to his shoe-lace, and three times after that. Twice his eye attested to the presence of a furtive figure, that seemed to drop to earth in the thick fog grass when he turned, only now he knew that his eye did not deceive him. He was being followed.

That the discovery did not tend to add much zest to his midnight ramble--even had there been any before--the Spawer would have been the last to deny. It is an unpleasant thing, at any time, to have one's back turned towards a stealthy follower of undeclared intentions, but moonlight and a lonely coast add still further unpleasantness to the situation. However, the fact remained, and it was no use getting into an unnecessary fuss about it. To turn back openly would not remedy matters much, or give the Spawer any particular advantage over his unknown pursuer. He decided, therefore, keeping cautious vigil over alternate shoulders as he walked, to push on to the cliff, without betraying the least sign of suspicion, and see to what extent this figure would press pursuit. So, quickening his step imperceptibly, and setting up a blithe, not too noisy whistle of unconcern, he came to the cliff, the shadow following.

The wind and storm of the past few days had troubled the sea, that thundered up in ugly assailment of surf about the cliff's soft earthen base, for the tide was rising. Awhile he stood, at the point where he had come upon the path, watching the great waste of chill waters with one eye, and the spot where the figure had vanished, with the other. The keen gaze of Farnborough gleamed out at him in sudden recognition, and here and there little intermittent pin-points of yellow pricked the horizon where boats rose and fell upon the bosom of the sea. Then he lifted his leg leisurely over the gate-stile, by which he had been standing, and sat for a moment astride of it. From this perch he commanded the hedgerow--that ran down to the cliff edge at right angles--on both sides, and could not be approached without his observance. But whatever object his follower had, it seemed certainly, so far at least, that it was unconnected with any ideas of direct encounter. There had been no attempt to gain on him; their relative positions now were what they had been at the first moment of discovery; and it seemed he might sit here till daybreak without his shadow's making any advance in the open. Suddenly, an idea to test the situation came into his mind, and on the instant he acted on it. The man, whoever he might be, was about fifty yards or so inland, on the shady side of the hedge, and watching the Spawer's conspicuous, upright figure keenly, no doubt. All at once the Spawer brought his second leg over the rail, descended, stepped quickly some paces inland, and drew into the hedge. Though the moon fell on him, the hedge was straggling and untrimmed, with somewhat of a dry ditch at its bottom, and long grass. Standing here, unobtrusively, it would take an active search to come upon him, and such a search would not only show him his pursuer, but give him some shrewd idea of the man's intentions.

*CHAPTER XXXVIII*

It was not long that the Spawer had to wait. He had scarcely subsided into his position, indeed, when he heard, on the other side of the hedge, the rapid "rff, rff, rff," that told where long grass was being torn aside to the passage of hurried feet. The fellow was running, then. It flashed across the Spawer's mind grimly, as he listened to the sound of him, that he did not think himself of such interest to any mortal man. And almost before he had time to gratify his ironic humor with a smile, the mortal man had scrambled desperately over the stile, flinging himself to ground on this side of it with such a thud of precipitation that he had to preserve his equilibrium with spread fingers in the grass. Next moment he pushed himself upright again, ran hesitatingly forward some paces, stopped dead, and commenced to beat about in a wild, blind search on all sides of him, as though he were dazed with the loss of his quarry. For a moment it came into the Spawer's head as he watched him that perhaps the man was mad or drunk. Certainly there seemed little of rationality about his actions. At times he ran; at times he cast himself so close upon the edge of the cliff that the Spawer's flesh crept cold, and he wondered whether he ought to stand by and see a deluded fellow-being submit himself to such dangers. If he went over there, with the boiling sea beneath, it was little chance he would ever come up again--till the tide brought him. But after a moment or two, the Spawer grew reassured that this catastrophe was not likely to happen, and continued watching in silence.

He was a furtive, unprepossessing-looking fellow, it struck the Spawer. His coat-collar was buttoned up to his neck, lending a particularly sinister touch to his appearance, and the coat itself hung upon him loosely, as though he had no shoulders, and bagged with an empty flatness about the waist, as though, too, he had no stomach. It was a tramp's coat, with tails--such as no honest rustic would wear--but had found its way here, through a nameless course of degradation, from the towns. And they were tramp's trousers too, that looked as though any minute they might come down; loose, lifeless, shapeless trousers, whose bottoms his boots trod on at every step. Otherwise, he wore a dark cloth cap, pulled tightly over his scalp, with its neb scowling down to his eyebrows, and his breath came and went vindictively--or so it seemed to the Spawer--as though he had been baulked of something, and was panting more through rage than exertion.

And all at once, puzzled to fit some kind of a key to the fellow's strange conduct, what enmity or what design he could have against him, the Spawer's mind harked back to the two letters he had received this night, and to the enigmatical epistle of the girl, and in a flash he knew his man.

But though he knew him, whatever the recognition might serve him in despatching theories of robbery and violence, it served him little for enlightenment. Added, indeed, to his perplexity, instead of subtracting from it. For what object had caused this man to follow him--him, his poor, crushed, and trampled antagonist--to the sea to-night? Had he not injured him enough, but that he must needs track him in this despicable fashion, and play spy upon his doings? All the hatred and unreasoning disregard that the unsuccessful have for the successful rose up within him at the discovery. Of the schoolmaster's virtues he knew nothing; sought to know nothing. It was enough for him that to this man he was indebted for his soul's humiliation; that this sinister-looking figure had supplanted him for occupation of the dearest territory in the world; and he rejoiced with a cruel and unhallowed joy that this, his vanquisher, had been given over thus into his hand.

Ten to one, were he only to make no sound, he could succeed in eluding discovery, for the fellow showed no aptitude in search, but success of this sort was not what he desired. He had been contemptibly dogged for some purpose or other, and he would have full revenge of the man's shame. Very quietly he stepped out of his shelter and showed his tall figure in the moonlight.

"You appear to be looking for something," he said.

At the sound of his voice, the man spun round eagerly on his heel, as though his first emotion had been of pure incredulous joy that his quarry was not lost to him. Shame succeeded upon that, to think of what the Spawer had been a witness, and his forward impulse was checked momentarily into a falling back on the heel that had urged him. Then, just as quickly, anger succeeded upon shame. Those chance words, uttered so carelessly, but with such a frigid tone of scorn--as though the Spawer in mind towered above him like an Alpine summit, and his lofty contempt was snow-capped--roused his wrath to desperation.

"You know what I am looking for," he said hoarsely, and advanced with both hands up at his coat-collar.

Could the Spawer have had but one glimpse into the surging hot mind of the man at this moment, and seen of what wild charges he stood accused, he might have turned the sword of his words into a ploughshare, and tilled honestly for enlightenment. But in his own mind it was he who had been wronged. And besides that, the fierce, unexpressed hostility of love was between them. Even had there not been this present cause of quarrel to kindle anger, they would have been rampant for the fray like two rein-bucks.

"I know what you are looking for?" he asked, and his voice moved contemptuously away from the suggestion as he might himself have moved (so the schoolmaster thought) from the contaminating touch of an unclean beggar. A clear, well-pitched, musical voice it was--so different from the schoolmaster's hoarse, toneless utterance--and its very superiority, seeming now to take conscious pride in itself, stirred up the listening man's worst hatred. In birth, in station, in presence, in voice, in possessions, and in love, this tall, insufferable figure prevailed. "You make a mistake..." he heard it say to him. "I know nothing at all about you, except that you have been dogging my footsteps for this last quarter of an hour. I know that. If you have anything to add to it, I am ready to hear you."

The lean, shabby figure of the schoolmaster flinched visibly in the moonlight at each fresh phrase, as if it had been a whip-lash that his antagonist was curling about him. With both hands clenched at his coat-collar, he seemed almost to be hanging on to resolution against a groan.

"Yes," he blurted out fiercely at last, releasing his hands at the same moment from this occupation, and crying out his confession like a wild triumph of delinquency; "I have been following you. You may know it."

"I do know it," said the Spawer.

"I say you may know it," the schoolmaster repeated, raising his hoarse voice another tuneless semitone up its chromatic of passion. "I don't care."

"Don't care," the Spawer told him coolly, "as you may be aware, got hanged. I would advise you to take profit by his example."

The schoolmaster's hands flew back to his collar again with one accord.

"You thought you were safe from me," he forced through his unsteady lips. "You thought you were free to do as you liked."

"I certainly thought I was free to walk along the cliff without being persecuted with these attentions," the Spawer cut into him.

"Yes; you thought ... you could trample on me!" the schoolmaster hissed at him venomously.

"I have not the least desire to trample on you," the Spawer assured him frigidly. "I would not tread on a worm if I knew it. There is room in the world for us both--if you 'll be so good as to make use of it."

"You think..." the schoolmaster cried passionately, "that because you come from big towns, and live in fine houses, and wear fine clothes ... that you can do what you like in the country."

"It seems I am mistaken," the Spawer apostrophised sarcastically. "In the towns, at least, we have the police to defend us from molestation by night."

"You think," the schoolmaster shouted at him, as though to beat down his words and tread them and his opposition underfoot, "... you think we country people are fit subjects for your scorn. You think you can walk over our feelings, and trifle with all our happiness as though we were mere paving-stones for your own evil enjoyments. You think we are the dirt beneath your feet."

"Indeed?" the Spawer remarked. "I never thought half so much about you as you suppose."

"You have thought it," the schoolmaster cried at him; "and you are thinking it. Every word you say to me is an insult. You want to tell me that I am beneath your notice, and that your contempt is too good for me. You think you can mock me indiscriminately, and make a fool of me."

"Not at all," the Spawer responded carelessly. "I have my own business. You can do that quite well enough for yourself."

"But you are wrong!" the schoolmaster shouted, in a voice almost inarticulate with passion, and the terrible cooped-up storm of hopes and fears. "You are wrong. You thought you could kick me aside like a dog, and leave me to the derision and contempt of Ullbrig. You thought you could break up an honest man's happiness for your own wicked diversion, and steal off like a thief with it. But you are wrong. You are wrong." He was almost weeping--though the Spawer did not know it--with the insufferable fever of desperation. Had the Spawer known it, he would have had mercy, and surrendered this wordy victory rather than fight to the finish with the poor God-forsaken, love-forsaken, self-forsaken devil that cut and lunged so furiously at him. But the only conclusion respecting this encounter, glimmering at the far back of his brain, was that the man was consumed with the fire of an unworthy jealousy, and he took joy in piling up its fuel--even at the risk of burning his own fingers. "But you are wrong! You are wrong!" the schoolmaster reiterated at him.

"It seems I am wrong in many things," the Spawer assented. "But that 's scarcely surprising; since I don't know who in the world you are, or where you come from, or what the devil you want with me."

"You know who I am," the schoolmaster shouted at him. "And you know what I want with you."

"Not in the least," the Spawer told him, "unless it is relief, but if so, you have a strange way of asking for it."

"You know it is not relief!" the tortured figure exclaimed. "If I were starving, I would go to my grave sooner than ask a penny of such as you--that have n't the heart of a dog. You want to put me off with words and sneers and scorns, but I won't be put off. You shan't put me off. I have stood everything that I will stand."

"You have certainly stood long enough," the Spawer remarked. "Don't stand any longer on my account. If you have said all you wish to say, perhaps you will kindly tell me which way is your way, and leave me free to choose the other."

"I have not said all I wish to say," the man cried, opening and clenching his fingers. "You shall not shake me off, for all your pretending. I have found you in time, and I will stick to you for the rights you want to rob me of. You shall not slip me. Where you go I will go. You shall not get away."

The Spawer pulled his moustache, and looked the man up and down.

"Really..." he said, after a while. "You are a smaller man than I ... but you tempt me very much to kick you."

In a second, at that threat of action, the pent-up torrents of the schoolmaster's rage and anguish burst forth from him. Anything was better than words. He rushed up wildly to his adversary.

"Kick me!" he cried fiercely, shouting up with hoarse voice of challenge into the Spawer's face. "Kick me! Touch me. Lay a hand upon me. You say you 'll kick me. Kick me."

He pressed so hard upon the Spawer, with arms thrown out and flourishing wildly, that even had he wished it, the Spawer would not have had purchase to kick him. Instead, he receded somewhat from their undesirable chest-to-chest contact, striving by gentle withdrawal to mollify the man's mad anger. For he had seen into his eyes, and their look startled him. Not for himself--he was in every sense the man's better, and could have wrought with him as though he were a schoolboy's cane--but for the man. It was borne in upon him suddenly anew, with terrible conviction, that the fellow was mad; the victim of some fierce hallucination--whose fixed point of hatred was in himself--and he repented now that he had goaded him to such a cruel pitch. And still the man pressed upon him. "Kick me!" he kept saying, utterly deaf to the Spawer's temporising and persuasive utterances. "Kick me. Touch me. Lay a hand upon me."

To lay a hand upon him now, even in mere pacification, meant an inevitable struggle, and such a termination was too unseemly to be thought of. As it was, matters had gone altogether beyond their bounds. To have chastised the fellow with scorn had been one thing, but to be involved in a retreat before the hoarse breath of a passionate madman was another, utterly outside all dignity. Sooner or later, too, he would have to stand or be forced over the cliff. The thought of the boiling sea below, to which, in the concentration of his faculties upon this ignominious encounter, he had been paying no heed, recalled him hotly, and he stole an anxious glance over his shoulder to learn where he stood.

And at that very moment he stood on the cliff edge, and it slipped and gave way with him. Wynne flung up his arms, beating the air with them like wings, to regain his balance, but he could not. An arm clutched out after him, whether to push or clasp him he did not know. Half spinning as he went, he doubled out of sight backward; and if anything were needed, apart from the anguish of his own mind, at that awful, inevitable moment, to add to the horror of his going, it was the schoolmaster's long, horrid scream.

*CHAPTER XXXIX*

That scream--having no part with the man's self, but tearing forth from him as though it were a liberated fiend--curdled the schoolmaster's own blood. This culminating horror of a night of horrors took hold upon the pillars of his reason, like a blind, despairing Samson, and overturned the temple quite. Before, he had had just the madness requisite to carry out what unaided reason could never have accomplished; but now, madness filled him like thick, suffocating smoke, and extinguished his last guiding spark of lucidity. From head to foot he was mad; mad with a terrorised madness that is one long mental scream, like the unrestrained scream of his lips. First, as the man went over, and his own cry rang like a terrible knell in his head, he dropped to his knees, and bound wild hands upon his eyes, to blot out the horror from them. Again and again and again, with insufferable rapidity, he saw--for all his binding--the horrid vision of the Spawer's beating arms; the sickening collapse; the sudden emptiness of sky. Again and again and again his own cry tore out in his ears. If his brain had been one great slate, and this cry the screech of a perpendicular pencil torn across it, it could not have scored it more terribly. All his hallucinations were reversed and turned against himself. His mind had no mercy upon him; he was a murderer. This was the death that came to him upon his bed. The horror of now fitted the horror of then like a bolt. He was a murderer, fore-ordained. The hot brand of Cain was on his brow. Twice the fatal cliff called upon him to come and look over at the scene of his crime, but twice he heard the surging of the sea below, and twice he dared not. Then the irresistible magnetism of his own murder drew him, and he crept forth the third time on all fours, and peered awfully over upon a small projecting shelf of the cliff. Close down by the roaring surf the Spawer lay stretched on his back, and looked with his dead face up at him. As he had fallen, so he lay. His head was to the sea; his feet toward the cliff at which they had struggled so desperately for hold; his right hand, by the force of rebound, had jumped across his breast, and seemed placed in mocking attestation upon his heart; his left lay limply from him without a bend, its palm turned upward, its fingers partly closed; his chin was thrown up, white and ghastly; his face a little sideways upon his cheek, as though in renunciation of this dark, wicked world, and seeking slumber. A very different figure of a fellow, indeed, from that proud six-footer of scathing independence that had mocked this miserable onlooker from above. And yet, how terribly triumphant. Even on his back, without a word between his lips, or a look in his eyes, he had more of majesty at this dread moment than life could ever have given him.

And so thought the man who, blindly seeking but to prevail, had put death's conquering sceptre in his hands. For the one moment of his guilty gaze he saw with clear eyes, freed from madness--as people are free from worldly thoughts that take their look upon the dead. But the moment passed, and his madness descended upon him once more, like the cloud of a whirlwind. It swept him to his feet, and drove him blightingly before it--anywhere away from the scene of that awful fall and cry. Before, he might have killed himself, but now, with the horror of death before his eyes, and ringing in his ears, he dared not die. Over gate and by hedgerow, through field and fence; beating and battling a mad passage for his flight against the armed hosts of standing corn; pitching blindly over stooks in the stubble; turning and doubling; falling headlong and regaining his feet with terrified fighting-fists, as though in conflict with unseen adversaries, so his madness drove him, like a leaf before the breeze.

*CHAPTER XL*

Out of the dark womb of Eternity--and with all the penalties and discomforts incidental to birth--Maurice Ethelbert Wynne was born again.

With pangs, with anguishes, with flashes of light, and alternating darkness; with terrible struggles to lay hold of this elusive state called life, that seemed floating somewhere about and above him, if he only could secure it, he drew shuddering breath of consciousness at last upon his little six-foot couch, and saw, through tremulous eyelids that were yet powerless to open themselves, a multitude of round things shining.

They were so many, and their light so marvelously great, that he went off through pain into darkness forthwith, and abode there for a space. Thence, after awhile, he commenced to struggle inwardly again for the life he had once laid hold of, and groping, found it; and looked through his impotent lashes once more, and at once the multitude of round things shining fell in, and hurt him, and a second time he let life go quite quietly, and relapsed into his darkness. But the taste for life, once awakened, cannot be so inanimately surrendered. Cost what cost in pain, lips will keep returning periodically to the cup--each time with further strength of fortitude for pain--till in the end hands are strong to grasp and retain, and life, sipped at first, is gulped with eager mouthfuls. And so, slowly but surely, the Spawer returned again and again to his multitude of hurting things, and looked upon them diligently, and patiently learned their shape, and studied them, and knew them in the end for moons. Vague, shadowy remembrances of a former life, or premonitory forecasts of the life he was now about to live, floated--not in his mind, for he had as yet no concentrated point of consciousness that could be called a mind--but, dispersed and uncollected, all about the dark void of his being. Names that he did not know for names flitted hauntingly about him, like bats--names that, as though he were a mere baby, he had not the strength or the capacity to utter, but that he somehow recognised and knew. One name, in particular, came to him in his dusky sojourn, and abode with him; a blessed, dove-like messenger of a name, whose presence was peace. When it departed from him he was troubled, and sought for it, as a blind kitten seeks after the breast. When he found it again he was content with his darkness; quite content to lie and be conscious that he was alive.

Then, to names succeeded shapeless dreams; after-shadowings or forecastings, as the case might be, snatched by violence from Eternity, and bringing him pain. Shadowy figures in conflict he seemed to see; men running; men pursuing; men wrestling; men falling--not men, as men are, but men as his infant mind conceived them, dark and formless and blurred; men like trees walking, whose movements disturbed him painfully; men crying; men screaming. When they screamed, instinctively he sought the shelter of darkness once more, for he could not bear the sound of that scream. It frightened him from life. Yet after awhile, he would be back at the moons again, nibbling at them industriously with his intelligence, like a mouse at cheese. They were moons now, he knew quite well. He did not know them as such by name, but he understood the substance of the things seen, and thus feeding on them and deriving nourishment, his consciousness thrived. One by one it diffused itself through the darkened channels and subways of his being. It reached his ears, and he heard a great buzzing, and a roaring and a beating--as though all his brain were being churned within him. It reached his limbs, and his being strove to stir them, and after many trials succeeded insignificantly, whereupon, with his lips he groaned. Centuries thus, it seemed, he floated, a mere helpless log upon the tide of existence, clutching at things he could not hold, bumping against consciousness for moments at a time, and being drifted off again into the dark; in reality it was scarcely minutes. Then, of a sudden, something icy cold and wet fell with a rude slap over his face.

The shock roused him, and the coldness contracted spasmodically the relaxed tissues of his thinking. All his brain, diffused hitherto vastly throughout space, seemed to shrink up at that Arctic contact, like metal in a mould, and occupy the narrow limits of his head, throbbing painfully at the restriction imposed upon it. Thought, in this cramped environment, became agonisingly congested. His head was a sort of Black Hole of Calcutta, in which thought seethed for outlet. Where one idea before had attenuated itself throughout the centuries, now centuries of thinking were compressed insufferably within the space of one moment. Life, that had been unoccupied, teemed all at once with the fever of activity. A hundred incidents seemed in progress within him at one and the same instant. His lips were useless to him for speaking, but from somewhere in his throat came a voice that poured out from him unceasingly, as though it were a tap, accompanying with narrative the course of events. Still, though all the forces of life and thought were humming at high pressure inside him, was he powerless to burst the fetters of his body. Like an iron man he lay, with his one arm extended, and his one arm bent, and his chin thrown upward, and his legs stretching from him to their limp extremities--miles and miles and miles away. Over and over again in mind he got the victory over this unresponsive flesh, and rose with it, and looked about him at the encompassing multitude of moons; and over and over again his mind returned dejectedly to its recumbent habitation, and knew itself deluded. The desire for movement was become a nightmare. All his being wrought in motionless agony to wake up his dead limbs to life, as his soul had been wakened. The horror of this inactivity grew upon him and focussed itself to a great, loud, liberative cry that should cut his bonds like a knife and loose him from this awful lethargy. But though the cry was within him, all prepared, his lips could not utter it. He was lead-weighted; feet, hands, legs, eyelids--not a member to help him.

And then the cold wetness fell upon his face and forehead a second time, and with a terrible spasm of anguish he pushed his cry. All heaven seemed to ring with it in his tortured imagination; he could not have conceived that the bulk of his effort had been wasted mentally before it reached his lips, and that the residue of physical impulse would scarcely have sufficed to deflate a kitten's lungs. Just another cry or two like this, thought he, as he rested from the exertion of it, and he would burst forth from his bondage and be free.

And again, with titanic intention, and the merest inappreciable flattening of his diaphragm, he launched his pitiable mew.

And this time it suddenly seemed to him that he had awakened some external sympathy on his behalf; that other forces were being brought to bear upon him from without--how, or whence, or why, he knew not. Voices--or his mental equivalent for voices--seemed disturbing the atmosphere of his being; besieging him, trying to lay hold upon his voice and give him a ladder to outer life. The moons too, as he stared at them through his eyelashes, appeared moving about in agitated disorder this way and that above the high wall of blackness that fronted him. Then, something detached itself from the wall-top, and slid downward with a rattle. He was here! He was here! Did n't they see him? In went his stomach feebly again, and he ejected his agonised sigh. And while desperately he sought to aid the outer assistance, and proclaim his dire need--of a sudden his attitude changed. The moons swam backward overhead, the black wall rose above his sight. What his paralysed limbs had failed to accomplish of themselves, was being accomplished for them. Arms were under his neck, hands were beating his cheeks, voices were calling upon him.

And all at once, with a great spasm, his eyes rolled round into their right position--it seemed he had been gazing out of the backs of them this while--and the blindness fell away from him like the stone of a sepulchre; and his ears burst open; and the calling voice came clearly through into his understanding.

Oh, surely that was Pam's dear voice! None other in the world would have had sweet power to penetrate such a darkness as his. And his lips dissolved, that had seemed glued inseparably together, and let him move them over the girl's name.

"... Pam ..." he said.

*CHAPTER XLI*

Yes, it was Pam's own self that knelt beside him and sustained him, her arms wound supportingly about his helpless body, his head on her knee, and shed tears of warm thankfulness over his lifted face, and caressed him eagerly with her voice.

"I thought you were dead..." she said tremulously.

His response flickered elusively to and fro at the bottom of the Spawer's being, like sunlight deep down a well; but he merely watched it with curious philosophic content, as though quite sufficiently satisfied to know that it was there.

"Where am I?" he inquired listlessly, after a moment, and then, out of sheer gratitude to the girl, without waiting to be told, subsided into peaceful slumber upon her knee.

So long as she was there to hold him and nurse his head, what more could a man want? To sleep with Pam for pillow ... ye gods! But his period of blissful oblivion was short. The beating and the calling recommenced, and he was forced into opening his reluctant eyes.

"You must not..." he heard the girl beseech him. "Oh, indeed, you must not! Try to come to yourself. Are you hurt? Do you think you can stand?"

He heard the questions plainly enough--in his grave he would have heard questions that that voice put to him--but their import excited him little. What did anything matter, so long as Pam was with him? She would look to everything. Trust Pam. All he did was to dwell pleasantly upon the sound of her voice inside, and seek to slumber to it, as a child is soothed by singing. But though his soul longed for this peace, she would not grant it, but plied her questions anew with strange, inexplicable unrest. He had never known Pam so unrestful.

"Are you hurt? Do you think ... you can get up ... if I lift you? Shall I lift you? Will you let me lift you?"

He fished about listlessly for a moment or two in the depths of his well, and brought up the word "Eh," as being both easy to catch and to utter.

"Eh?" he said, without the slightest desire to be told for information's sake, and made as though once more to settle his head.

But she rubbed his cheeks vigorously with her hand, and roused him with her voice anew.

"Oh, please, please..." he heard her beg him, with tears. "Try to wake up now and answer me. Don't go back again. You must n't go back again. Do you think you can stand if I lift you? Do you?"

"Where am I?" he asked again, in the same apathetic voice.

He did n't care where he was. Wherever he was, Pam was with him. That was good enough for his taste. He merely wanted her to nurse him, and soothe him, and lull him. All speculation, all curiosity, had been knocked out of him by his fall. The heavens might have opened now, and the sight of angels descending would have caused him no wonder.

"You are down the cliff!" Pam told him, shouting the words in his ear, with the twofold object of reaching his remote understanding and rousing him by sheer strenuousness of voice. "You must have fallen. Don't you know what's happened? Can't you remember?"

He was down the cliff. He must have fallen. Did n't he know what had happened? Could n't he remember? Of a sudden--yes, of course he could remember. He was down the cliff. He must have fallen. The schoolmaster had pushed him. He 'd been fighting with the schoolmaster in a dream, and got pushed over. What did it matter--a dream? He 'd often got pushed over in dreams.

"Can't you remember?" came back to him, in echo of the girl's voice, and he told her: "Yes, he could remember." Furthermore, to prove his good intentions, he asked her with his eyes shut: "Where are the moons?"

"There 's only one," the girl shouted into his ear.

"That all?" he said, fishing hazily for the words as before.

"It 's up there--there in the sky." She let down his head a little, so that the moon might come into his line of vision. "There ... do you see it?"

He saw it and shut hie eyes, turning his head away from the light.

"All right," he said, and added a dreamy "Thank you."

Something boomed out behind him, and he saw the girl's hand go up defensively above his head. Next moment cold trickles were wriggling down his face. Some rested on his eyelashes and blurred the moonlight.

"What 's that?" he asked complacently.

"It's the sea..." the girl cried into his ear, and wiped the wet tenderly from his face and lashes with an end of sleeve drawn into her palm by her fingers. "The tide is coming up. We must not stay here any longer. We shall be drowned if we do."

"Oh!" he said. Drowned, would they? What was drowning to a man who had been dead? And then, quite irrelevantly--its irrelevancy even puzzled himself, in a placid kind of way--"are there any mushrooms?"

"Oh, yes, yes," the girl told him eagerly. "Lots and lots of them. But not down here; up at the top. We must get up to the top first."

"I 'm the boy for mushrooms," he said, and thought he smiled knowingly, but it was only his inside that smiled. The face of him never moved a muscle.

"See ... I am going to lift you!" the girl shouted. "Let me put my arm about you ... like that. Yes. And now like this. Now ... so. Do I hurt you?"

My Heaven! Did she hurt him? The groan that followed needed no conscious bidding to find the outlet of his lips. His immobile face was broken suddenly into seams of pain, like the cracking of a cast.

"Oh ... my poor darling! My poor darling!" the girl cried, lowering him a little, in an agony scarcely less than his own, and the tears started from her fast. "Have I hurt you? I did n't want to hurt you. But we can't stay here. However much it hurts we can't stay here. We must get you moved. I can't let you drown for the sake of a little pain. Come! try again. You 'll help me, won't you? Now. Is that better? Is that better? Am I hurting you now?"

And again she raised him. In a measure the first pain had paved the way for a second, and being prepared for it this time, by twisting his face he was enabled to bear the lifting; but it was agony. Such complete change of posture seemed to shake up all the dormant dregs of his discomfort, like the lees of a bottle. His body was become no more than a mere flagon, for the contents of mortal anguish. His heart beat as though it had been knocked loose by the fall. All the inside of his head had been dislodged, and bumped sickeningly against the walls of his skull. His ribs were hot gridirons. His back was on fire. But at least he stood unsteadily upright. Within the compass of the girl's arms--as once, on that first night of their meeting, she had been within his--he stood rocking helplessly to and fro; his knees trembling treacherously beneath him, only saved from sinking by the uplifting power of the girl's embrace. Suddenly it seemed to him, with a warning buzz in his ears, that the darkness was coming on again. A great weakness crept over him and enfolded him.

"Let me ... sit down..." he said faintly. He thought that by sitting he might elude the enveloping embrace of the darkness.

"No, no; not here. Not just here..." the girl implored him. "Not so near the edge. Try and walk. Please! ..."

And then the darkness closed upon him swiftly, as he stood in her arms, like a great engulfing fish.

But it disgorged him, almost at once. It seemed his own pain deterred it. And slowly, what time he suffered untold agonies of body, the girl half pushed, half carried him from the perilous edge of their narrow shelf, toward the cliff side; weeping to herself for the pain she knew she was inflicting; talking all the while to interpose her soft, tender voice between himself and the keen edge of his suffering. Did she hurt him now? That was better, was n't it? Oh, that was beautiful! Just another step like that. And now just one more. And now just one to finish. And now just a little one to bring him round here. And got him propped up in the end--though Heaven knows how--with his back against the ugly black slope of cliff, and his face towards the sea, that bit with raging white teeth against the miserable crust of their refuge, and roared and snarled mercilessly for their devourance.

And there, resting awhile, with the assistance of his own pain that had roused him, and the stern sight he saw, the girl assiduously coaxed and fretted, and rubbed his apathetic consciousness, like a cold hand, till it returned at last some vital warmth of understanding. As far as his loosened brain would allow, all the doings of this night came back to him, remotely remembered. Through clouds of intervening suffering he called back his quarrel with the schoolmaster; the words, even, that had been uttered; his horrid plunge over the cliff, and that sickening arrest at the bottom. And before these things had happened, came back to him his love for the girl, and his loss of her; his resolution and his irresolution; his night's packing, and the letters he had received. Even it occurred to him that the big lamp would be still burning--unless its oil were exhausted by now. It was all unreal and incomprehensible, but he remembered it and never doubted. This was no new life, but the old--to whose jagged splinters of breakage he was being so painfully spliced. What a wonder his breakage had n't been beyond all repair! How on earth had he come, neck downwards from that great height--a height it would have sickened him to contemplate jumping--and yet been spared? The mill of his mind ground slowly, by fits and starts, and not over-fine. All its mechanism seemed dislocated and rusty and out of order; in mid-thought it would be brought up suddenly with a horrid jolt that seemed like taking his head off. The noise of its working, too, was almost deafening.

"What are you doing here?" he asked vaguely, all at once, of the girl, who, with one arm about him, was seeing how far he might be trusted to keep his own balance against the cliff. It was a question that had been glimmering at the bottom of his well for some time past--only, so far, he had never been able to perceive clearly why she should not be here as well as anywhere else. But now the strangeness of her presence forced itself upon him.

"I was on the cliff..." she said, speaking in quick gasps, as the result of her exertion, "and heard you fall. At least ... I heard you cry out. You cried out ... did n't you? as you fell."

"Yes..." he admitted slowly, for the mills of thought were grinding again, and he knew whose cry had brought him succor. Murderous, cowardly cur! Friction of anger set up in his mind and heated him--who knows? ... perhaps for his own good. Anything, only to rouse him.

The girl shuddered at that cry's remembrance.

"... I heard you. I was by the boat ... and I knew something dreadful had happened ... and ran back, and looked over the cliff ... and saw you, and scrambled down to you. But we must n't waste time. Not a moment. If once the tide gets over here.... Do you think you can let me leave you ... for a minute? I must find a way up the cliff. So." She withdrew her hand from him, holding it outstretched, however, for a moment, with fingers close upon him, in case he might show any dangerous subsidence. But he did not. "Are you all right now? Do you think you can keep just like that?"

He assured her he was all right, and could keep just like that. He was by no means convinced in his own mind that such was the case, but he felt his acquiescence due to the girl, and gave it.

And she, with a final adjusting touch of finger, that was a caress all told, consigned him timidly to his own insecure care, and turned her energy upon the cliff.

Even as she looked up its black, forbidding side, smooth and sheer, and clayey with the recent rains--and remembered the desperate abandon of her descent--her heart forsook her. Calmly, first of all--trying to stimulate her bosom to courage by deliberateness of action--she sought of the cliff for some mode of ascent; desperately, after awhile, when none forthcame, flinging herself at the slimy earth, kicking with feet for a foothold--that slid down with her when she used it, as though she had been trying to scale butter; tearing with her hands at straggling tufts of grass, that pulled out by the wet roots, soft and sodden--struggling, scrambling, fighting.

And at last the fearful truth was borne in upon her--or perhaps, more accurately, the seal was put upon the truth that her bosom had secreted when she sacrificed herself over the cliff-edge for this man's saving--and with tears, not of terror, but of bitter defeat, she came back to him. Oh, the agony of that confession! Yet with death so close upon them, it was no moment to offer the cup of false hopes. However she tried to screen the knowledge from him, death would shortly tell him everything.

"It is no use..." she said, her tears streaming, her hands all muddied, that she wiped hopelessly on her skirts. "... I can find no way."

"Oh," he said, so apathetically, that for a moment she thought he had not understood. But it was only the mills that were grinding.

"It is all my fault," the girl burst out bitterly. "If I had run to the Dixons' at once ... they would have been here now ... and saved you. But I never thought. I was in such a hurry.... Oh, forgive me ... forgive me, please!"

And into her hands, for the man's sake, she sobbed as though her heart would have burst. It was so dreadful for him to be lost like this, when she had been so near to saving him. For herself it mattered nothing, who had so little to lose. And though she strove to extinguish the thought, there was a kind of proud, defiant exultation at being drowned in such company. Oh, God forgive her such wicked thinking! Her heart, so anguished during these latter days, could not, in its wildest moments, have wished a more companionable death than this.

After awhile, the mills of the man's mind, slowly moving, ground a little grist for his lips to get rid of.

"... Can you get up the cliff by yourself, if you leave me?"

He seemed to be talking to her out of the closed chamber of dreams. What he uttered reached her, indeed, but there was something between them yet, like a wall, that both were sensible of.

"But I would not ... I would not!" she cried impetuously.

"But could you?"

"No, no, no ... I could not!"

"Are you quite sure?"

"Quite. I could not. Indeed, I could not."

"Shall we both be drowned?" he inquired.

To the girl the question came with a callousness almost brutal. Moreover, it cut her to the quick to hear how this fall had blunted the keen edge of the man's susceptibilities. It was as though another being of an altogether inferior calibre were usurping his body. Oh, that for their last agonised moments together this terrible dull veil might be rent, and for dying happiness she might know him as she had known him in the past! And for this she maintained her weeping. But inside, the man was stoking up the furnace of his mills with desperate activity, to get work out of hand before this last. He, too, was filled with ripe grain of thought to be ground, and knew how bruised and blunted he was--and how little near he could place his thoughts to the thoughts of the girl.

"What were you doing ... on the cliff?" he asked laboriously.

All his within was striving to find a short cut to somewhere, but his mouth would not let him.

"... I was going away."

"Oh! Where to?"

"... Anywhere. To Hunmouth ... round by Garthston."

"Why were you going anywhere?"

"Because ... because ... did n't you get the letters? I left them on the piano."

"Oh, yes; the letters. I read them. But I did n't ... know them." "Know them" was n't what he wanted to say, and he struggled for a moment to find the requisite expression, but his mills were not equal to it. "I did n't ... know them," he repeated vaguely.

"Oh ... because ... because..."

And thereupon the girl plunged into the shameful deeps of her wickedness, and made confession. A hurried confession it was, for time pressed, but she cried it in its entirety into his ear--shielding nothing but the absent man ... and her love.

And the mills of the Spawer's mind thumped faster.

"I want ... to ask you something," he said slowly, "... before I die."

"Yes ... yes." The girl was at his lips in a moment, to catch their precious outpouring before death should stop her hearing for ever. "Ask me. I am here."

"I want to ask you..." he said. "You know why I was going back. The other letter was ... from Her. She asks me to set her free. If there had n't been ... been any other one in the case, and I 'd asked you ... to marry me ... would you have married me?"

And in an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life out of his body into her own, and given it an abiding habitation.

"Oh ... my love, my love!" the girl wept, through the wet lips that clung to him. "What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times die to learn that you had loved me ... than live and never know it."

And she poured her streams of warm tears over his face, and wrapped him about with her arms, and bound her body upon him. And in the fusion of that mighty love, the laboring mills of the man's mind burst free.

"Why did you come down to me?" he cried. "For God's sake get away while you have the chance. I 'm not worth saving now ... I'm only the fragments of a man.... But you!"

For all answer she bound him in tighter bondage of protection, as though she were trying to steep their souls so deep in the transport of love that they should not know death or its agony.

"If you leave me..." he urged upon her, "and get up the cliff ... there may still be time."

But she clung to him.

"For my sake, then!" he implored her. "You are my last hope of safety. For the love of me, try and do it. We must not die like this."

And for his sake, with her old desperate hopes falsely revived, she redoubled kisses of farewell upon his mouth and lips, and threw herself passionately against the relentless wet wall of their prison. Now this side, and now that. Now trying to kick out steps with her feet; now trying to tear them with her hands, she wrought at this frantic enterprise, and the man watched her, and knew it to be of no avail. And then, at his urging, she cried out--lifted her own white face to the sullen black face of the cliff, and cried--cried with words, and rent the air with inarticulate screams. But all was one. Like a thick blanket the cliff, so close upon her, muffled her mouth and I smothered the voice that issued from her.

"It 's no use ... no use," she said, and came back to the man.

And at the same moment the cruel, horrible sea, that had been boiling turbulently about the far brink of their ledge, with occasional casts of foam, thundered against the cliff, as though to the collected impulse of intent, and rushed up, roaring, and gained the summit of their slender refuge at last, and curled a scornful, devastating lip of water over it. They stood for a moment like marble, the two of them, at this clear message from the mouth of death; watching the water slide back after the retreating wave, and pour away at either side of their earthen shelf amid an appalling effervescence, and then the girl woke up again.

"It will not be long ... now," she said, very quietly.

Then she went to the man and laced her arms about him--

"Promise me..." she said, "you will not ... let go of me ... when the time comes."

"I promise you," the man answered, very huskily.

"May I call you ... Maurice ... before we die?" she asked, and her voice faltered at this.

"Please..." he begged her; and she said "Maurice" a time or two.

"Hold me ... Maurice," she said. "I may ... turn coward ... at the end ... but hold me. Don't let me go. I want to die with you."

"I will hold you," he answered, and their arms tightened.

And again the sea thundered, and this time something swirled about their feet. Then they asked forgiveness of each other for inasmuch as they had offended, and received the sacrament of each other's pardon.

And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for death.

*CHAPTER XLII*

On this same eventful evening, the absent Barclay o' Far Wrangham returned to himself by slow stages from nowhere in particular, at some vague, indeterminate point between Hunmouth, Sproutgreen, and Ullbrig, having missed Tankard's 'bus by a small matter of two days and one night.

Out of five golden sovereigns that had gone forth with him, he retained a halfpenny, which, wedged tight in the corner of his trouser's pocket, kept troubling him like a conscience at times. On his head was a brimless hat that some friendly cattle-drover had exchanged with him on Saturday. A tramp had picked up his overcoat and was walking the high road to London in it; but Barclay o' Far Wrangham still retained the new waggon-rope that had been one of his early purchases in Hunmouth market on his arrival; and with this over his shoulder he lurched onward. He possessed not the faintest idea of destination, but his legs shambled along with him instinctively, like horses that knew their road. They took him safely across fields, and over stiles, and along hedges, and down narrow pathways between standing corn, and through gates--that he hung over affectionately and went through all the most conscientious formulae of shutting, and still left open behind him. Somewhere short of Sproutgreen he perceived a figure coming distantly down the road in his direction. At a hundred yards away or more he made elaborate preparations for its greeting; wiped his mouth; let down the waggon-rope to the ground, trailing it loosely by an end; took his hat off and reversed it; rubbed the cobwebs from his eyes, and held out an arm like a sign-post in attitude of friendly surprise. There had been a word in his mouth, too, for welcome; only it slipped him at the last moment, but he made an amicable bellowing instead.

"Bo-o-o-o-oh!" he cried, exploding loosely, like a good-natured cannon, whose recoil sent him staggering backwards over his legs till it seemed he meant retiring all the way to Hunmouth. By a gigantic effort, however, he resisted the backward impetus when it had sent him off the roadway into the shaggy side-grass, and fell forward on his hands. "A-a-a-a-ay!" he shouted genially. He was brimming over with foamy friendship for this dear, familiar stranger. "Noo wi' ye!" and stood up on all fours at the greeting, like a well-intentioned dog, whose muzzle was the battered cleft in his hat-brim.

Thus adjured, the pedestrian drew up with some severity on his aloof side of the road, and gave Barclay to understand, with a grudging "Noo" of inquiry, that he had nothing whatever to hope from him on this side the Jordan. As he had chanced to stop in a line with the dead-centre of Barclay's hat, Barclay could not immediately discern him, and was filled indeed with suspicions of treachery.

"Wheer are ye?" he inquired, after a few moments of futile activity, making valiant efforts to keep his eyelids lifted.

"Ah 'm 'ere i' front o' ye," his unknown friend replied, with small show of favor, regarding this picture of human debasement with scorn.

"Are ye?" Barclay inquired, somewhat foggily, and pushed himself with much effort on to his haunches. "Which way div ah want to be?" he asked.

"Wheer did ye come fro'?" the figure demanded sternly.

"Eh?" said Barclay.

"Wheer div ye come fro'? 'Oo are ye? What 's yer name?"

"Barclay o' Far Wrangham," said Barclay unsteadily, going forward on his hands again.

"Ah 've 'eard tell on ye," the figure remarked. "Gan yer ways wi' ye. Yon 's yer road. Come, be movin'."

For some moments Barclay rocked silently on his all fours, as though thinking deeply.

"Which way div ah want to be?" he commenced again, after awhile, and there being no immediate response, embraced the opportunity for a little slumber.

Having slumbered pleasantly for a space on his hands and knees without interruption, his head swaying in circles close to the grass as though he were browsing, he awoke of a sudden, under consciousness that he had received no response to this question, and working the muzzle of his hat diligently in all directions about him, found to his surprise that he was alone.

The discovery troubled him, first of all, so that he muttered darkly in his throat like distant thunder. Then the brewing turned to sparkles, and he laughed deliciously on the grass, rolling over on to his back, and sprawling with limbs in air as though he were a celestial baby, brought up from the bottle of pure bliss. Lastly, his mind darkened to anger, and he rose to all fours, roaring defiance after his departed enemy. It took him some time to find his hat after this, which had rolled away from him during his Elysian laughter, but his knee trod on it at last, and the moments expended in its discovery were doubled in his efforts to apply it to his head.

A dozen times he clapped it down, sideways forward, and the same number it rolled off him, and had to be resought.

Last of all: "Nay, ah weean't be pestered wi' ye!" he cried indignantly. "Gen ye can't be'ave yersen proper, an' stay where ye 're put, ye 'll 'a to gan."

And "gan" it did, sure enough, into the hedge bottom.

"Lig [lie] there, ye ill-mannered brute!" he shouted after it, and filled with righteous wrath, picked up the waggon-rope and staggered to his feet for departure.

"Come up wi' ye, ye lazy divvles!" he cried at his legs, that, through their long inactivity, betrayed a certain tendency to let him down. "Div ye 'ear? 'Od up [Hold up]. Dom yer eyes ... if ye weean't do better ah 'll walk o' my knees an' shame ye."

"Gum! it 's tonnin cold," he decided, after some progress.

"Ah nivver knowed it ton so cold of a neet this time o' year," he added, a while later.

And a short way further up the road:

"Gum ... bud ah feel it i' my yed [head] strangelins!" he declared, and putting up an inquisitive hand to learn the cause of it, was blankly amazed to discover himself hatless.

"Well! of all ... bud that 's a caution!" he said, and stopped as dead as his legs would let him. "Well ... it 's no use seekin' after spilt milk. Noo ah s'll 'a to mek best on it."

The best of it he made forthwith; and to compensate for this frigidity of head he put such warmth of pace into his advancement that at times--with his head a body's length in front of his feet, and his feet churning in the rear like twin-screws--his progress was considerable. To have stopped under a road's length would have been to fall as flat as a pancake. Nothing short of the most gradual arrest could preserve his equilibrium, and as the easiest solution of the problem was not to stop at all, he forged ahead till the wind whistled on either side of his ears. And this constant freshness, combined with the exposed state of his head, so sobered and revivified him that, by the time he was passing through familiar Ullbrig, he already knew what houses were which, and who lived in them; the day of the week; how long he had been absent; and was commencing, in common with the history of all these nocturnal or matutinal returns, to see the evil of drink, and speak openly of wine as a mocker.

Moodily pursuing this well-trodden path of his conversion, he slammed his way through the gates, one after another, and passed Dixon's sleeping farm-stead with a covetous eye upon its moonlit windows.

"Ay, you 've not slipped fi' pun [five pounds] doon yer belly this 'arvest-time, Jan Dixon," he reflected, as he turned his back to the scrambling white house, so calm and self-contemplative in the moonlight, and cut across towards the cliff. All his loquaciousness leaked out of him now, in sight of the goal which he had been three days aiming at and missed up to the present, and he tramped along with the impersonal passivity of a cow being driven to market; untroubled as to fate, and almost thoughtless. The sea shook the cliff, as he walked, with seismic shivers, and boomed noisily in his ears; but he 'd known it off and on now for forty years, and minded it--particularly at such moments as this--as little as the buzzing of his own eight-day clock. Of a sudden, however, the sea-surge bore up a sound to him--a small, shrill, penetrating sound, that pierced his passivity to its vital marrow, and caused him to throw up his head, with a gaping mouth to all quarters of the compass about him, for the sound's location. He was sufficiently sober by this time to realise how very drunk he had been, and in the desolating flatness of life's Sahara--lacking any pleasant green oases of illusion--that he was laboriously traversing now, he knew the sound to have been produced by real, living, human lips; for his own brain was far too stagnant to create fancies. Therefore he eased the wain-rope to the ground, and holding up his open mouth to the sky, as though it were an ear-trumpet, he listened for a repetition of this discordant note in Nature.

And again it came: small, faint, embosomed in the roaring surge, but cutting as a diamond.

This time he had no doubt. It came from over the cliff, and had the despairing ring of death and danger in it, that not even returning prodigals like Barclay can by any means mistake, though they 'd gone away with twenty pounds in their pockets instead of five. And bellowing response at the top of his lungs, he ran to the cliff edge.

"A-a-a-a-ay! 'Ello! Noo wi' ye! What 's amiss?" he cried, and dropping on hands and knees, thrust his head recklessly over the brink of it.

And again the cry rang out from almost straight below him--shriller and more terribly charged this time with the agony of animated hope.

"Lord Almighty!" said Barclay; "it 's a lass."

*CHAPTER XLIII*

To this day the tale of that eventful midnight is told in Ullbrig. How Barclay, returning from Hunmouth market, where he had sold three beasts and a score of sheep, and drunk the money, heard Pam's last despairing cries for assistance, beaten out of her by the sea itself. How he ran to the edge of the cliff, and looked over, and saw the two drenched figures sticking to the side of it like wet flies against a pudding basin. How, even while he watched them, the sea boiled up again as though it were milk, and rose bubbling above where they were, and made him shut his eyes with a groan for what he might not see when the milk subsided. How, praise God, they were still there when the water sank down. How he untackled his waggon-rope, shouting courage to them all the while, and made a loop to one end, and hitched the other to the adjacent stile-post, and cast the slip-knot down the cliff. And how, for an age, while he swore at them from above, the girl would not come up before the man; and the man would not come up before the girl. And how, owing to considerations which he did not then know or understand, namely, that the man was powerless to give any help to his own ascent, and the girl feared their rescuer might be unable to haul him unaided--the girl slipped the noose under her shoulders, and struggled and clambered up the cliff-side while Barclay pulled upon her. And how, almost before she was on the top, she had detached the securing loop and thrown it down to the man. And how he had just had time to slip it over his neck and under his shoulders before the next sea came, cursing and swearing because of the loss of them, and seethed up three parts of the cliff, so that the foam of it slashed their faces. And how they felt the rope first slacken and then go dead heavy in their hands, and knew the man was off his feet, and would have been swept away but for their hold upon him. And how they tugged together, the two of them, and how, at certain intervals of progression, the girl had wound the slack rope round the post, against all possible danger of slip or relapse. And how, in the end, the man's face showed above the cliff-brink, and how they had toiled him over; and how the girl had thrown herself beside him, and taken him into her arms, and wiped his streaming face, and called upon him by name, with a hundred solicitations and endearments, and kissed him.

Till, in Barclay's own words: "Ah think theer 's one ower monny on us," he told them.

And the tale, continuing, recounted how these two, Barclay and the girl, made a seat with their hands, and bore the man back to Dixon's between them; and how the man, wringing wet though he was, kept falling asleep on the shoulders of one or other of them, and telling Barclay he was the boy for mushrooms, and he 'd eat them now she 'd given him up. And how they got him home at last, and how Barclay took double handfuls of earth and flung them up at Dixon's window, and how Dixon put his head out first of all, and cried:

"Naay, Barcl'y, man! Naay, naay! Next farm. Ye want to tek more care i' countin' when ye come 'ome this time o' daay."

And would n't believe Barclay's reasons for bringing him down, till Pam joined her voice with his, when he said: "Well! Ah don't know!"--and the whole household stood on its legs that same moment.

And then a mighty fire was roused up in the kitchen, out of the grate's still hot embers, at Miss Bates' blowing, and the blinds were pulled down carefully by Mrs. Dixon, and all extraneous elements--men, and so forth--were unceremoniously banished, and Pam, shivering, crimson-eared, bright-eyed, and hectic--but wildly joyous--let them skin her of her sodden habiliments as though she had been a drowned rabbit, and was rubbed dry with coarse kitchen towels till her white, starved body glowed like a sunset over snow. And Jeff, having been despatched at Pam's instigation to the cliff, and having run all the way there and all the way back, thumped lustily against the outer panels of the kitchen door, and Pam's parcel--looking, oh, so frail and pitiable and shamefaced in its new surroundings--was drawn in by Mrs. Dixon, and its contents bestowed, as the circumstances demanded, upon Pam's own body. And Pam seemed so genuinely overcome with their kindness that all questions of a controversial nature were by one consent avoided; and not a word asked--beyond mere details of the rescue--as to the strange juxtaposition of Pam and her bundle, and Mr. Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, along the cliff at this time of morning. To such degree, indeed, did Pam's own tearful, lip-quivering emotion of gratitude play upon her two ministrants, that they discharged their self-sought duties in a reflected emotion scarcely less profound than the original; giving the girl tear for tear, and quiver for quiver.

And when they had rubbed and towelled her, they dressed her in the same loving, lavish way, and vied with each other in finding articles from their own wardrobe which might fit the girl; and when they had finished with her, they looked upon her completed presentment as proudly as though they 'd actually made her.

And while Pam was being in this way taken to pieces and readjusted and put together again, Barclay and Dixon did the same by the Spawer, upstairs in his own bedroom; and laid him between the blankets with a hot-water bottle at his feet, that was fetched from the kitchen; and Arny harnessed Punch to the spring-cart and drove off for Father Mostyn and the Doctor--not that Father Mostyn's presence seemed called for on any urgent or spiritual grounds, but that Pam knew what a slight he would think had been administered upon his vicarial office, were he to be left one moment uninformed of such an occurrence as this.

And until the arrival of the Doctor, Pam's courage and good hope had never once deserted her. He for whom she would have died gladly twice over was saved from death; but now there were other vague things to fear. And as soon as she heard the ominous rattle of the spring-cart's return, that well-known clear-cut voice of the ecclesiast, and the sharp, Scotch, businesslike tones of the Doctor--as direct and straight to their purpose as a macadamised road ... she quailed, and her fortitude left her. It seemed as though the whole atmosphere were charged at once with electrical dangers at lightning-point.

She sat with her face plunged in her hands, by the side of the roaring kitchen fire, not daring to rise, or move, or go out to meet these awful newcomers, lest her movement might precipitate the danger. All her hearing was drawn out from her like wire, insupportably fine, to the doors of that dread bed-chamber. Sounds near at hand, the roaring of the fire, the fall of cinders, the subdued babel of downstairs voices, had no existence for her. Her hearing, as though it had been a telescope, was aimed above them to some distant star, and missed these terrestrial obstacles by miles and miles--but every sound from the far landing, every whisper, every turning of the handle, every creak of the bedroom floor-boarding, was magnified a hundredfold. To support such auricular sensitiveness it felt she needed the strength of a hundred bodies, instead of that poor tortured one.

But at last, lifting her face from her hands with the blanched cheek of high tension for the very worst, she heard the tread of general exodus; the resonant "Ha!" of Father Mostyn, and the Doctor's little sharp-tongued, Scotch-terrier voice, giving out its reassurance to the applicants at the staircase foot.

"Na doot he 's had a narra squeak, an' ah 'm no goin' to say he 's oot o' the wood yet," she heard him tell them. "His back will have had a nasty twist, an' there 's some concussion, but there 's naethin' broken, and no dislocation. Na, na, he 's no sae bad. Shock 's the worrst o' 't. Dinna mek yerselves onhappy, he 'll mend verra nicely. Oh, he 'll mend fine!"

And going on beneath the Doctor's voice like an organ pipe, to support and sustain and enrich it with ecclesiastical authority, was the voice of his Reverence.

"Ha! No doubt about it. Concussion. That 's the mischief. But nothing broken. No fractures or dislocation. No injury to the clavicle, or more important still, to the dorsal vertebra. It's purely a case of shock. Keep him well wrapped up in blankets, get some hot brandy and water for him, and see that the bottle is n't allowed to grow cold. Ha! that's the way. Beautiful! beautiful! We 'll soon bring him round again."

And the tale, as it is told, goes on to tell how in Dixon's kitchen that morning--for day was breaking now--Pam made long confession of something to his Reverence the Vicar. Nobody in Ullbrig knows for sure what that confession was, except the Doctor, who did not share the Dixons' delicacy in withdrawing, but sat in Dixon's chair on the other side of the fire, with his steaming toddy glass--compounded out of the sleeping man's decanter--and stirred the fire with the poker when it needed it, and was heard quite plainly to level his voice on such direct interrogation as:

"But ye hae not explained ... so-and-so."

Or, "He may thank his guid stairs ye were there to hear-r-r! But hoo cam ye by the cliff at midnight?"

But as Pam would have told him freely anything about her body if illness had required it, and as she could trust him like Father Mostyn's second self, it would have been cruelly, distrustfully invidious to divide her carnal and spiritual confidences on this occasion with so fine a line; and since the Doctor felt no compunction in their acceptance, Pam felt quite tranquil in their bestowal. To these two men she told the history of her past few days, shielding everybody save herself; how she had come to love the Spawer, and how he had told her of his departure; and how she had wept on her bed; and how she had feared facing him that morning, lest she might weep betrayal of herself, and of a love she had no right to let him see, or trouble him with; and how, while she was trying to gain time for her terror, he came on her before she was aware; and how she had plunged the letter into her pocket; and how she had taken it back with her, not daring to deliver it after that ... and how ... and how...

Here, in her desire to screen the guilty partner of her trouble, her nervous narrative seemed all plucked to pieces. Her words, indeed, were less for the purpose of telling than for the purpose of stopping their own lips from asking.

"... And so ... he said he wanted me ... and he said he loved me.... I know he loved me, because he 'd told me so before. Only then.... And after that...."

But the Doctor, comfortably ensconced in Dixon's fireside chair, with its red chintz cushion in the small of his back, and half a steaming tumblerful of toddy inside him, was in no mood to be put off with such ambiguous verbal impressionism.

"Stop, stop, stop!" said he, holding up an arrestive toddy-tumbler at her. "I haena got the sense o' that. What d' ye say happened to the letter?"

"Oh ... I cannot ... I cannot," Pam said, the tendons of her narrative relaxing suddenly as though never could they be brought to bear her over this part of the history. But in the end, with point-blank questions from the Doctor, and gentle leading-words from the Vicar, Pam passed over that rocking bridge of all that had happened--only, every admission made against the man's interest was coupled with a pleader for his great love of her. And she imparted to them, with a face glorified, how that, when nothing seemed sure but death, the Spawer had told her his other attachment was broken. and had confessed his love of her all the time, and she had poured out her love of him ... and ... and they knew the rest.

"Ay, it 's a very quairr complaint, this love!" the Doctor reflected, pulling out his pipe, "... an' harrd to diagnose. Ye never can tell. Ye never can tell. But losh! ah thocht ye were clean gyte when ah hairrd ye were goin' ta marry yon fellow!"

But Father Mostyn was n't astonished in the least; waltzed gravely on his feet with a superior, restrained tightness about the corners of his mouth, and a far-away sparkle in his keen grey eyes, as of one to whom revelation is no new thing.

"Beautiful! beautiful!" he mused, when Pam had finished, and was looking with a timid, sub-radiant eagerness from one to the other. "There 'll be a scandal, of course. That 's the proper penalty for not having confided your trouble into the care of Holy Church." Here the Doctor made a savage thrust with the poker through the gratebars, and stirred and stirred up the red coals till they glowed to incandescence. "But better late than never. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, dear child. Our spiritual Mother never yet turned away from any supplicant that sought her with true faith and humility. We 'll do our best for you. Of course, the business is not so bad as it would be if it had been unexpected. But fortunately, we 've been prepared for it. No mistaking the symptoms."

And the tale, as Ullbrig will tell it to you to this day, goes on to relate how Pam would not return to the Post Office, but took up her post as nurse by the Spawer's bedside, and could hardly endure to let a bite pass her lips thereafter, for her care of him, till he made the mend.

And that same morning, news traveled to Ullbrig that the schoolmaster had been found, roaming and raving like a madman, in the neighborhood of Prestnorth--where a married cousin of his was living--and was in bed now at her house, with brain fever. Not likely to get better, the rumor said, but therein it proved false, for a fortnight later he resigned the mastership of Ullbrig School, and wrote, at the same time, to Miss Morland, requesting that his effects might be despatched to him by carrier as soon as she could conveniently find leisure to undertake the commission. Another letter accompanied it, addressed to Pam in his clear Board School script. In proclamation it was a penitential acknowledgment of his sins; in effect it was a cacophonous outburst of reproach, love, despair, and recriminations. She sorrowed for the man and his hard lot--for if he had loved her so torturingly it was no fault of his own, but he had taught her to fear him, and sympathy can never truly subsist in the same bosom where fear is.

There were those in Ullbrig at first, as Father Mostyn had predicted, who, with their sharp tongues, whittled the affair to a fine point of scandal; those who considered the schoolmaster an ill-used man, and Pam a conscienceless hussy who had jilted him under circumstances that would not too well bear the stress of investigation; those who whispered; and those who nodded their chins with compressed lips of meaning. But they had the melancholy dissatisfaction of fearing, each one in his own heart, that these things might not after all be true. Before such a man as Barclay it would never have been politic to repeat this primitive creed at any time. A champion of Pam's from the beginning--when he cried reproof upon them for their uncharitableness towards the child--he was doubly her champion now; strode up and down over the district like a mighty sower, spreading seed of her heroism broadcast from both his hands. And so it came to be that the real history of the girl burst its early grain of scandal, as though it had been sprouting wheat, and sent up its produce into the clear blue heaven of truth. To-day, when Ullbrig tells you of that Monday midnight, it only gathers breath of proud inflation to breathe how one of its daughters--by name Pam--went down the cliff for the man she loved, and how Barclay saved them both.

*CHAPTER XLIV*

But for Pam and the Spawer, the true tale of their history only began after the terrible events that give Pam her place among the heroines of the district. They used its remembrance as a steel on which to sharpen the blades of their present bliss, but it was not an inherent part of their story. That commenced when the horror of this was over; when the Spawer woke up finally, with a lasting wakefulness, on his bed, and saw Pam, and smiled.

Ah! What a beautiful opening chapter that was--full of a golden tremulousness on the girl's side, as of timid sunlight peeping through the curtains of a May morning when a great day is in the balance. For there had crept into the girl's heart while she watched him a strange little dark bird, that fluttered ... and was still, and fluttered again ... and again was still, gathering its strength and grew, and was fledged and flew up--almost into the clear skies of her reason, though not quite--and sang plaintive melodies to her; among others, that the man she thought of as Maurice had made love to her in his madness; that he was not free; that he had never loved her; that she was only tending him back to consciousness for the cruel happiness of finding that his consciousness on the intellectual side meant unconsciousness on the emotional; that he would remember nothing of his delirious words, and that his love had been but the outcome of bodily weakness. Last of all, she grew to dread his waking for the news it might tell her. When he stirred ... she closed her eyes momentarily, with swift apprehension of the worst. When he lay a long while still, she prayed he might wake promptly and put her out of her misery.

For it was become a long misery of suspense. All her happiness was laid aside like fine raiment; she dared not look at it or think of it; her heart made ready to wear mourning. And oh, the anguish of that moment, when at last--while her swift blood turned suddenly turbid in her veins, and the very breath in her lungs curdled thick to suffocation--he came out of his sleep, and his eyes opened incomprehendingly upon her ... and she, drawn back in apprehension, with her hands clasped up to her lip ... met his gaze, and knew not how to respond to it.

And then that glorious burst of certainty when recognition woke in him wanly and illuminated him like pale glad sunlight, and he struggled to free his arms of their coverings, and held them out to her ... and she had gone into them like a dove descending ... and put her own red, moist lips to his dry ones ... and kissed his lingering soul back to life and happiness.

Ah! To have lived that one brief moment, as Pam lived it, was to have lived a lifetime abundantly. Now indeed that she knew he loved her for certain, and had had the true sign and seal of it, she was ready to die forthwith, if need were. It was enough to have held his love once in her own soul's keeping, as a child treasures the moment's confidence of some precious breakable vase. Pam was not greedy. She would have been quite content with no more.

But Heaven was kinder to this dear terrestrial angel than that, and filled every moment of her days henceforth with gladnesses as great, and greater. At times she wanted to get right away from everywhere and everybody; Heaven seemed to keep her plate replenished with celestial meats quicker than her soul could consume them. She wanted to dally with the taste of them, and extract their last nutritive juices of virtue. But she ... well, she was only human, after all, and said grace, and ate what was set before her.

In a way, Pam's prayer was almost of gratitude and rejoicing that her love had been given to her in this hour of his weakness. While he lay there, helpless upon his bed, following her mutely with his eyes, the fact of his belonging to her seemed set forth and glorified to an extent almost apocalyptic. In image he was a little child, dependent upon her breasts for subsistence. Every moment furnished her with opportunities for feeding him with the living love that flowed in her own body. Oh, truly, truly, he seemed hers when she nourished him thus back to life with her ceaseless attentions; with caresses; with sudden fondlings--such as only his helplessness could have made possible; with a thousand ministrations thoughtful and divine. Her thoughts were always of him; her every movement showed him plainly as the motive power. All the love of him that had been gathering in the stillness of her soul flowed out towards him now in a great psychic stream--as warm and broad as a beam of sunlight. From her fingers when they touched him; from her lips when they rested on him; from her attitude when she turned towards him--flowed this constant current of love, love, love. Like a very planet was the life of Maurice Ethelbert Wynne in these days--a luminous orb swimming in pure ether of love. The love of a true, good woman is great and wonderful, but the love of this girl was so great and so wonderful that in the strong tide of it the Spawer lay half incredulous on his bed and blinked. It was no love of laughter; no love of jingling words; no love of triflings or pretty affectations. It was a strong, tense, electric current of unselfish feminine devotion that set the very atmosphere a-quiver. When she came near him he could almost hear it humming aeolian music, as though he had laid his flat cheek to a telegraph post.

And in a way, too, he was glad to be thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a love, and learning his love all over again, like an infant its alphabet, from the lips and looks and actions; the dear, large-hearted ABC Primer of Pam. Her very love of him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her soft, velvet eyes, that had been dark enough and deep enough before, darkened and deepened for the accommodation of this love till they were beyond all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips, that had been red enough and tender, colored now to a deeper, clearer carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of them; love that stirred and eddied when she spoke, and settled down again into their ruby hollows when the lips reposed. Her lashes, that had been black enough, and long enough, and thick enough, lengthened almost under sight of the man; grew black as ebony and so thick that when she looked upon him from above, they lay in unbroken flatness upon her cheek. And her freckles too--those dear little golden minstrels on the bridge of her nose and brow--grew more purely golden, till at times almost they gleamed like minute bright insets of the precious metal itself, and sang love like a cluster of caged linnets. At whiles, when the Spawer looked at her, such a proud and tearful tenderness floated into him that had he been another woman, sure he must have wept. Her confidence in him; her self-sacrifice; her unceasing devotion; her countless ministrations--frightened him for what his own conduct must be ever to repay them.

"Little woman..." he was moved to tell her, during that first day of his convalescence, "... do you know ... I think I don't ever want to get out of bed or on my legs again."

Pam was plainly alarmed, for it seemed to her he had suddenly caught the desire of death which comes at times to those whose days are numbered. But he made haste to reassure her.

"I just feel..." he explained to her, "... as though I could wish to lie here, like this, for ever and ever and ever, with you by me to look at and make me happy. Kiss me again, Pam, will you? It does me good."

Then Pam stooped over him, as she was always doing, and slipped her linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and kissed him (praying for him the while, though he did not know that), and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him once more, and kissed him again. For who was there now to lay a forbidding hand between their lips? Who should stop her now from telling him she loved him, loved him, loved him?

*CHAPTER XLV*

And rapidly the Spawer drew back, from its intricate shadowy by-paths, to the great broad highway of Life.

How it would have fared with him but for that revitalising power of love, if there had been no Pam to cling to and sustain him, no man can positively say. The lonely Maurice Ethelbert Wynne of our latter chapters, void of hope or happiness or aim, might have turned up his hands and sunk under the deep sea without a struggle. But Pam was hands and eyes, and feet and lips, and thinker for them both.

Emma Morland brought the letters round in these early days, but Pam opened them, at the Spawer's express bidding, and read them to him aloud in her musical fluty voice--the voice that had won her a place in his heart before even he had set eyes upon her. And as she read, the Spawer, sitting in the big chair by the open sunlit window, with cushions under him of Pam's placing, would explain to her the various allusions; let her into his life; throw open all its gateways to the girl. In the inmost shelter of his soul he felt as though he needed the comfort of Pam's companionship.

"Nixey" stood for So-and-So, he would explain to her; and "Jack" was the brother of So-and-So--the fellow that did this and that and the other that he 'd told her about, did n't she remember?

And did n't Pam remember? Oh, my Heaven! Pam remembered. Not a word he ever said to her that she forgot.

Then, if there were any letters to answer, Pam would seat herself at the table, with his writing-case thrown open, and dip deft fingers here, for envelopes; and deft fingers there, for paper; and draw forth the pen, and wield it as though armed for the fray; and would spear the ink-pot with it, and wait upon his words with a persuasive "Yes, dear?"

And the Spawer would make prodigious pretensions of thinking, and not a word come to him sometimes, because of the girl's face. His mind held up its thought as an obstinate cow does milk, and never a drop could he squeeze from it. All he could think of was Pam.

"Oh, bother the letters!" he would tell her. "They stop my thinking about you. Why must I pawn my attention to a horrid old business screed when I want never to take it from you?"

"Don't you?" says Pam gladly, and melts over him with her smile, wrapping him up in such a heavenly mantle of indulgence and love and devotion that he almost feels himself among the saints.

And oh! the joyousness of that return to the outer life, when Pam led the Spawer out at last, she carrying a cushion and a little net-bag of literary food (a French reader and the like); and they betook themselves to the harvest-field, and sat down under the blue sky in the stubble, with their backs against the golden stocks, and watched the elevated figure of Arny riding over the sea of waving corn, like another Neptune, turning off the wheat from the tip with rhythmic sweeps of his trident; his eyes steadfast upon the tumbling crest of corn beside him; and they contemplated the busy shirt-sleeves of the band-makers, pulling out their two thin wisps of straw from the recumbent "shawves," splicing them dexterously, and twisting them--across their chests and under their arm-pits, till their arms flap like the wings of a crowing rooster--into a stout-stranded band, that they lay out in the stubble alongside the flat heaps of fallen grain; and they watched the harvestmen following, who rake up the loose corn into a round bundle against the flat of their leg, walk with it, so clipped, to the ready-made band, depose it there, stoop, gather the two ends of the band in their strong hands, squeeze the sheaf in with the knee, bind it, make a securing tuck with the straw, and taking up the trim-waisted shock by its plaited girdle, cast it aside out of the path of the reaper on its next round.

And then, when "lowance" time was proclaimed, this stock where Maurice and his Pamela were seated would be made the headquarters of the repast. Here would come the welcome brown basket, and the carpet bag with its bottlenecks protruding; the blue mugs and the tin pannikins; the cheese and the bread; the pasties and the sweet cakes; the tea and the beer. And here would come Dixon's genial voice, greeting them from afar:

"Noo then, Mr. Wynne! 'Ow div ye fin' yersen ti morn? Very comfortable, bi t' looks of ye. Ye 're in good 'ands, it seems."

And when the Spawer grows equal to it, it becomes a daily obligation for them to wander across the intervening stubble and pasture to Barclay's farm--where the sails of his reaper can be seen churning the blue sky above the hedge level, like the paddle of a steamer--just to give Barclay's stocks a turn, and show themselves not forgetful of their deliverer. The time comes, of course, when they must cease thanking him with their lips, but Pam's mere gaze upon him is a gratitude, and Barclay would have missed it, if she failed him one day, as he would miss his pipe or his "lowance."

"Ah," said he, on a certain occasion, looking over with a manifest nice eye of critical observation, and finding no fault, "If ah 'd 'ad a lass like you to tek me at start, ah mud 'a been a better man, an' a richer."

"But there are others," Pam told him encouragingly, "... besides me."

"Ay," Barclay cut in, with a grim humor. "There is. Ower monny, lass. Bud they 'd 'ave to be good uns after ah 've 'ad you to sample. Ah would n't tek onny rubbish noo, an' it 'd 'ave to be rubbishin' stuff 'at 'd tek me. Ah 'm ower well known 'ereabouts. 'Appen ah mud get chance wi' next farm if ah change."

But the seed of resolution germinated in Pam's breast, and some days later, getting Barclay to herself, it pushed its pure blades through the warm soil all suddenly.

"... Oh, Mr. Barclay," she begged him, going close under his broad chest, and showing the peeping hands of petition. "You won't be angry with me ... please?"

"Nay, that ah weean't," Barclay protested staunchly. "Oot wi' it! What 'ave ah been doin' noo?"

"I want to ask you something," Pam continued, a little more softly, and a little more rapidly. "... Something very particular. I want you to promise something."

"Ay," said Barclay assentively. "Ah can promise ye, lass. Ah can promise onnybody, so far as that gans. But it's keepin' of it 'at's not i' mah line."

"If you promise _me_ ... you 'll keep it," Pam insinuated very softly, but with an almost irresistible forcefulness.

"Ah 'm none so sure," Barclay reflected. "Ah know what ye want to ask me."

"What?" said Pam.

"Ye want to ask me to gie it up."

"Yes," said Pam, after a pause, "I do."

"Ah 've tried ... lots o' times," Barclay admitted.

"But not for _me_!" Pam urged. "Not for the sake of anybody. Oh, Mr. Barclay ... you don't know how unhappy I 've been at times about you, of late ... to think that you 've saved my life--and his life--and put this happiness in our way ... and all the time you 're not taking any care of your own life ... at all."

"Why, lass," Barclay told her, but visibly troubled about the eyes by her solicitude. "Ah 'm sorry ye 've let me be a trouble to ye. Ah 've been nowt bud trouble to missen an' ivverybody. But where would ye be? ... an 'im too, if ah 'd kep' pledge sin' last time ah signed 'er? Eh?"

"I know; I know," Pam admitted. "I 've thought of that, too."

"Ay," Barclay took up, pleased with her admission. "It's a caution when ye come to think on it. If ah 'ad n't been mekkin' a swill-tub o' missen, an' walked back when ah did--it 'd 'a been good-by to ye, an' long live teetawtallers. It just seems as though Lord 'ad called me to Oommuth for t' puppos--though ah did n't know it at time. An' 'ow am ah to know, if 'E calls o' me ageenn, same road ... 'at 'E 'as n't seummut else 'E 's wantin' doin'? Eh noo?"

"Perhaps..." Pam suggested pleadingly, "... perhaps it was n't God that called you, Mr. Barclay ... but it was God that sent you back. Don't you think it might be that?"

"Noo, ah sewd n't wonder," Barclay decided, with obvious admiration for the girl's ingenuity. "But it 'll be a rum un for me to know which way 'E wants me to gan ... or which end 'E 's at."

"... And you 'll promise me, won't you?" Pam besought him, and took hold of his watch-chain. "You 'll promise me to fight your very best ... for my sake."

"Ay," said Barclay, after a pause. "Ah can bud try."

"You 'll try hard, though?" Pam adjured him--finding too much fatalism in the tone of his promise for her satisfaction.

"No.... when ah say ah 'll try, ah mean ah 'll try!" Barclay reassured her. "Ah s'll try my very best for t' sake of 'oo asked me."

And Father Mostyn and the Doctor are constant attendants upon the Spawer's recovery too, and stay for meals whenever they want them; and tell him when the whiskey flask is running low.

And it comes to be decided that their marriage shall not take place for a year. And meanwhile the Spawer is going to stay where he is; and Pam is to push on with her music, and her French, and with her English, and fill her dear little head with the intellectual fare for which it has always hungered. And she is to do no more letter-carrying. Father Mostyn has inhibited her from that with an _ex cathedra_ usage of the great signet. To remain at the Post Office in an official capacity in face of present circumstances would be an act of rebellion towards the Church, and exceedingly offensive to Jehovah. As the girl's spiritual and corporeal guardian, he charges himself with her care until she can be decently and respectably married. And they will go, all three of them, to Hunmouth at times, by Tankard's 'bus (oh, bliss! oh, heavenly rapture!) for purposes of shopping ... and the sheer pleasure of it.

And the Spawer talks seriously of coming back to Ullbrig after the honeymoon, and fitting up a little place for their own two selves, where they can be near Father Mostyn, and all their old friends; and where he can work earnestly, and without distractions; and where they can escape all the jealousies and soul-corrupting ambitions of towns and places where they "live."

"Oh, little woman!" he tells Pam, "I can't bear to think of your giving up your own dear self, and letting your soul be shaped to the conventional pattern of the world. I want you to be what you are--and for what I love you. You shall see all the big places, of course, dear. We 'll save up our coppers and manage that somehow. But let 's see 'em from the outside. Let 's go and look at them through glass windows, as though they were so many great shops, and come back to our own humble happy life, and break bread and be thankful. The world for us, dear, is just our two selves. We 're two little human hemispheres that go to make our one globe, and if we 're only happy in ourselves ... why, let the other planets go hang! Because you love me I just feel I don't care how many people hate me. They can hate their heads off. They can cry 'pish' to my music. They can turn aside their faces when I go by, as though I were a pestilence. What I do I want to do now for you. I feel I would rather write a little song that pleases you, love, than compose a Beethoven symphony for the world to bow to. And why? Because, dearest, I know that the world is as ready to kick me as to bestow one ha'porth of its kindness ... but You! All the pleasure I can give to you ... is just an investment, which you can pay back to me in love at a thousand per cent."

"Is n't it funny?" says Pam, though without showing the least appreciation of the avowed humor, "... what love is. I 've thought the same as you, too, but not put so beautifully. I just want us to try and be like what we are now, in our hearts, as long as we live. At times (do you?) I like to think of you as belonging to me ... as though you were every bit mine. And at other times ... I feel frightened of having you. The responsibility seems somehow too great. And then I just think of myself as belonging to you. And all I want ... is to creep into your heart, dear, and for you to shelter me. Oh, Maurice! To think. Six months ago ... three months ago ... I had no thought of you, or you of me! And we might never have met each other; never have loved each other! Is n't it dreadful?"

"What the eye does n't see, darling!" Maurice tells her, "... the heart does n't grieve. What we never know we never miss. But now we 're going to make up for what might have been, are n't we?"

Pam says yes, they are. "And oh," she says, "if you had n't found me you might have found somebody else, Morrie dear, do you think it possible that I may be standing in the way of somebody you don't know at all ... that you might love better?"

"Very likely you are, dear!" Maurice says, acting Job's comforter. "But anyway, I 'm ready to risk you, and take my chance of what may be for what is."

And this time Pam is ready to risk it too, and does not tell the Spawer, as once she told Ginger:

"There must be no chance in love!"

*CHAPTER XLVI*

One bright morning in late September, when the sky dreamed as blue as June, and the sun shone August, a stranger passed through into the churchyard by the lich gate, and his Reverence the Vicar, having received telepathic intimation of his presence, along one or other of the invisible slender filaments that connect the Vicarage with the churchyard, emerged shortly from his retreat, like a fine full-bodied spider, and captured his prize by the side wicket, with a "Ha!" of agreeable greeting.

"A stranger within our gates!" he observed, in courteous surprise, rocking to and fro upon his legs in the pathway, and balancing the ebony staff across both palms, as though he were weighing theological propositions. He encompassed the sky with a comprehensive circle of ferrule, and thrusting up a rapt nose to appreciation of its beneficent blue, "You bring glorious weather!" he said.

The stranger acknowledged with marked politeness that the weather was as his Reverence had been pleased to state. He was an elderly man, soberly habited in black, and a compression of mouth that seemed to betoken one whose office exacted of him either deference or discretion, or perhaps both.

"A pilgrim to the old heathen centre of Ullbrig?" his Reverence inquired. "... An antiquarian at all? A connoisseur of tablets? or a rubber of brasses?--in which case we 've nothing to show you."

The stranger said he was not exactly any of these things.

"Ha! ... an epitaph hunter, perhaps?" his Reverence substituted agreeably, as though desirous of setting him at ease.

Nor scarcely an epitaph hunter ... in the precise sense of the word, the stranger disclaimed. He scanned Father Mostyn sideways with a deferential regard of inquiry. "The Vicar, I presume?" he said.

His Reverence acknowledged the appellation by inclining leniently towards it.

"I thought ... I could not be mistaken," the stranger told him. "As a matter of fact ... I had intended taking the liberty of troubling you with a call, after giving a glance round the gravestones here. It is possible, if you would be so kind, that you might be of considerable assistance to ... to me in a matter of some importance."

Father Mostyn wagged the divining rod sagely over his palms.

"A question of the register? Births? Deaths? Marriages? A pedigree in the issue, perhaps?"

"To a certain extent, sir, you are quite correct." The stranger compressed his mouth for a moment. "I may as well be explicit on the point. Indeed, there is no reason, sir, why any particular secrecy should be maintained. I am here to pursue investigations on behalf of Messrs. Smettering, Keelman & Drabwell, solicitors, of Lincoln's Inn, who are acting according to instructions received from a client of some importance. Our object is merely to trace and establish connection with a member of our client's family--considerably to this member's advantage, I may assure you."

His Reverence looked speculatively over the stick as though the last few sentences had escaped his precise observation, and he were trying now to reclaim the import of them.

"... A military family at all?" he inquired.

The stranger eyed him with respectful surprise and dubiety for a moment.

"... An old family of importance," he admitted slowly. "I should say it might be called a military family." Then he stopped. "Perhaps..." said he, and looked at his Reverence.

"Ha!" said his Reverence blandly. "And the present client? An army man, is he?"

"The son of one, I believe, sir."

"To be sure. Precisely. The son of one. Beautiful! beautiful! One or two fat benefices in the family, do you know?"

"I rather fancy ... there is one attached to the estate. There may be more, for anything to my knowledge." The stranger followed the lead with the resignation of one who plays void of trumps. "If you know anything..." he hazarded.

His Reverence stroked a gorgeous nose of wisdom.

"No mistaking the symptoms. Not a bit of it. Your client seeks recovery of a daughter?"

The stranger demonstrated as much surprise as his discretion and his respectfulness would let him.

"You can inform us ... where she is?"

"Certainly! certainly! We have been expecting you. I thought you would n't be long in reaching us now. To-morrow ... or Thursday, I thought." His Reverence cast a fine finger of effect towards the white headstone, rising from the grass, beneath the east window. "She is there."

"Dead?" said the stranger.

"Your client is just a little matter of thirteen years too late."

"Her married name was Searle?" said the stranger, as though offering the fact for the priest's verification.

"To be sure. On the gravestone. On the gravestone. 'Sacred to the memory of Mary Pamela Searle.' And her father's name, of course, was..."

"... Paunceforth, since you know it, sir, ... of Briskham Park, Hampshire."

"He will be getting an old man," said his Reverence.

"Seventy-four ... or five," the stranger responded, "... and very feeble. He has had one seizure already, and is anxious to make amends, before he dies, for an act of early severity. At one stage of the proceedings there was a child involved. A daughter. Is she still living? If you can give me any information likely to lead to her recovery, I may tell you that expense will be no object at all. No stone is to be left unturned, by our client's instructions, to trace matters to their final step. And I may add that ... as this is now the last surviving branch of our client's family ... and he is a gentleman of considerable wealth..."

"Exactly," said his Reverence. "I think it will not be difficult to conclude matters to your client's entire satisfaction. His granddaughter has been, and still is, under my safe care.... Just come along with me as far as the Vicarage. There are a few things there in my possession. ... Beautiful! beautiful! Quite an Indian summer we 're having."

And that same day, before dinner, the news is racing all over Ullbrig that Pam's grandfather had sought for her and found her; and that she is to be a real lady at last, and ride horses, and drive carriages, and order servants of her own, and live in a great big house in a great big park, where deer are grazing and peacocks stalk the terraces, and will never come back to Ullbrig any more, but give them all the go-by now, and set her nose up higher than ever; and the Spawer is only marrying her for her money.

Steggison says to himself with a Satanic joy:

"Noo all s'll get a chance at post-bag. She promised me ah sewd 'ave fost try at it if owt 'appened 'er. Mah wod! Bud ah 'll gie 'em James Maskell an' all. They 'll 'a t' run when ah call of 'em--ne'er mind if they weean't!"

And James Maskill stands forlornly with his back propped against the post-house bricks, and a heel hitched up to the wall beneath him, and his hands in his pockets, and his mouth screwed to a spiritless whistle that can't produce the ghost of a sound; staring at nothing, and thinking of nothing; and feeling nothing--for life in front of him is nothing now, and he would n't have the heart to fetch Dingwall Jackson his promised bat across the lug, even if you caught him and held his head up for the purpose.

And Emma Morland is bursting with pride, and weeping with the misery of losing Pam--for this fashionable interment of Pam in the classic vaults of High Society fills her with a more terrible sense of their severance than a little green grave in Ullbrig churchyard.

And the postmaster makes an impressive chief mourner, standing by the counter with set face and lowered eyes as though it were a coffin, and telling his daughter, when she comes hither to embarrass him with her demonstrations of grief:

"It 's all for t' best, lass no doot. We s'll larn to get ower it i' time."

And Mrs. Morland, her mingled gladness and sorrow commingling to reminiscence, tells, through fond tears, how Pam did this, and Pam did that; and how she 'd always thought of others before herself; and what a strange sad house it would be without her--and wept herself into perspirations, and wiped her tears and her steaming forehead with large double sweeps of her apron. And Ginger went off his food again--for though she 'd never been his, at each new name with which hers was coupled, he felt once more as though he 'd just lost her.

And Pam went dancing up to Cliff Wrangham that day, hugging his Reverence's arm--as sad as any of them, and so joyful that it seemed not earth she trod on, but the big round prismatic blown bubble of a dream, shivering warningly, all ready to puff into nothing and let her down into nowhere. And when they came to Dixon's, Pam went into the little parlor, and looked at the Spawer, and said, "Oh, Morrie!" in a doleful voice of preparation. For, to tell the truth, though she was come here intended to play a little comedy on him, with a triumphant _denouement_, her own conviction in things actual (including, for the time, their own happiness) had been so surprisingly shaken that, despite her errand's being presumably of gladness, she looked, as she looked at him, for all the world as though she had seen a ghost.

"Good gracious, darling!" said the Spawer, in concern, when he saw her. "Whatever 's been happening now?"

"Oh, Maurice!" said Pam again, trying hard to win back assurance that he and she were not two mere unsubstantial figments of somebody else's dream, but flesh and blood, and dear and bend to each other. "I 've something to tell you, dear--I mean, to ask you, dear. Do you love me?"

"Do I love you?" repeats the Spawer, with a look of incredulous surprise, and a tinge, in his tones, of severity. "What a remarkable question to ask a man--and at such short notice! Really, Miss Searle ... I must confess you surprise me."

"Oh, but do you, do you?" begs Pam.

"Well, it 's dreadfully, horribly sudden," says Maurice. "And you put me quite in a flutter. But since you 're rather an attractive girl ... well, yes, I do."

"Oh, but suppose ... suppose..." says Pam, going on....

"Yes, little riddle-me-ree?"

"Suppose ... suppose I was n't what you 've always thought me. Suppose it were found that ... I was n't a lady at all. Suppose I was somebody altogether different from what Father Mostyn said I was."

Sundry speculative shadows rise up in the Spawer's mind, but he is not dismayed, and feels no flinching.

"Well?" says he encouragingly. "And suppose you were?"

"Would it make no difference?" Pam asks tremulously, it must be confessed, for oh ... if now it should!

"Darling," says the Spawer firmly, "not the least little bit."

Pam wants then and there to clasp his avowal and proclaim her mission. Her soul has scarcely strength for further dissimulation, but for the full crop of joy that she hopes to reap in the end, she keeps her hand to the plough.

"Would you want to marry me ... just the same?" she asks.

"More!" says Maurice Ethelbert. "A hundred times more."

"Why more?" Pam inquires vaguely; her curiosity suddenly fanned to seek the reason of this strange great increase in his affection for her.

"Because," the Spawer tells her, "the less you are to the world, dear, the more you must be to me. The less claim the world can make upon you, the more I feel I 've got you all to myself."

"You would still marry me, under any conditions?" persists Pam.

"Under any and all."

"And you won't let me go?"

"I won't let you go."

"Whatever people say?"

"Whatever people say."

"You 'll hold me as tight ... as you held me when we thought we were going to die ... that night."

"Tighter, darling, tighter."

"Even if..."

"If what?"

"... I should turn out ... just a bit of a lady, after all, dear?"

The Spawer is going to answer, but he stops suddenly, lifts up the girl's face, and looks straight into her eyes.

"Pam!" says he.

THE END