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Tom was no adventurer like his tyrant vagabond-friend John. He was no devil-may-care swashbuckler like my lord's bastard. He would have made a first-rate sergeant-major of a regiment, a first-rate boatswain of a ship. Something ... a certain pride, a certain fling, a certain chivalrous magnanimity . . . had been knocked out of him forever by those bullies in Gladman's House at Grey lands. They had found Tom Barter a frank gentleman— they had left him a secretive cad. It was only with John, whose friendship antedated those Grey lands days, that this reserved man let himself go; only with John and with any petticoat of the lower classes!

How often had he stared into the bottom of his pewter-pot, where a little brown liquid made a fairy moat around the bubbles of white froth! “I have not got a soul in the world that really cares,” he would think then, “except John; and he's nothing much to rely on!” and then he would sigh, put his finger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket, where he kept his silver, and place a sixpence beside his plate. A\e! imi h-»v. iv. <::^ -;i:vu-thise with these working-girls: Oh. what kind, <\\Lrt ^-c^l.^^I Oh, what pretty ways of making a man feel that he v\as a ir.a:;!

As he entered his comfortless room at the top of a saddler's shop, and poured out the water from the bare white jusr and selected the thin little bit of Pear's soap, which he had been using for a fortnight, rather than the big new square \elluw piece, with such hard edges, that his landlady had put there this morning, it came over him that he really was leading rather a desolate sort of life. “But if I can get Tossie Stickles to undress for me somewhere or other, or even to let me play with her in one of those Spinneys beyond Bushey Combe, if 11 make up for a lot! It's certain that if I were married and had a nice fireside and my books and a garden, I couldn't enjoy myself with these girls any more. And they are so sweet and unexacting! Oh. they're so different from these finicking bitches who think themselves ladies!”

He ran down the stairs and out into the street. The remainder of the hours from now on, till he was asleep in his chilly room above the saddler's, seemed invariably to fall below the average of normal human experience. The day did not become actually miserable, but it was far from gathering any glow or lustre as it waned. It was just a day dying out; of no more interest, of no more importance, than a bonfire of cabbage stalks, over which someone has thrown a bucket of water.

The bruise in his nature never hurt him except when confronted by a man or by a woman of his own class. It was this bruise which Mary, all unwitting, must have struck again and again. It was because of this bruise that he had never dared, in the whole course of their platonic friendship, to attempt to make love to Mary or even to kiss her. “Will you marry me?” he had blurted out one day, on the side of Tor Hill, and Mary —reacting from her morbid slavery to Miss Drew—had murmured a reluctant “Yes, if you want me to, Tom!”

Once in the street today, Barter made his way, as usual, not to the cheerful tea-shop in George Street, where John and Evans had had lunch, nor to the one presided over by Sally's mother in High Street, but to a common little restaurant called the Abbey Cafe where a waitress? whose name was Joan brought him a plate of fish and potato chips. This overworked attendant resembled that Joan in the song, “While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” and no other educated man in Somersetshire would have flirted with her as Barter did. But it was but a poor pleasure he got from this—indeed, night after night he would swallow his ill-chosen supper and answer the wench in sulky monosyllables while he stayed on and on; merely putting off the moment when he had to face the sight of his cold bed, his portmanteau on the floor, and the picture of Tel-El-Kebir over his fireless grate. Tonight, he managed, by his extraordinary power of sympathy with the economic side of a waitress' life, to put off his moment of rising from that hard seat at that dirty tablecloth till nearly nine o'clock.

Again in the lighted street, he was seized with a sudden loathing, for that wretched bedroom of his, and something like' a spasm of bitter distaste for his whole life in Glastonbury.

“Fll go and see Mary,” he thought. And then he thought, “What's the use?” But when he came opposite the darkened windows of the saddler's and heard, through the open side door, the sound of his landlady's voice scolding her husband, his feet began automatically taking him to the Abbey Horse.

When Lily Rogers opened the door to his ring, she smiled more pleasantly upon him than she would have done upon any other surprise-visitor at that late hour. Barter had long been the chief favorite, out of all the gentlemen in Glastonbury, with Miss Drew's servants, just as he was a great persona grata with Miss Drew herself.

“We've got company in the drawing-room,” Lily said. “Mr. Dekker has brought that man Geard here, to see Miss Drew. She never would have seen him if the Vicar hadn't told her it was her duty. They're all in there now! Would you prefer that I called Miss Crow out, Sir, and brought the lamp into the dining-room?”

Barter nodded; but seemed in no hurry to dismiss Lily, who, in the dim hall-light and in her black dress and white apron, looked a sweet picture of domestic security.

“How's Louie?” he asked. “Have you been up to The Elms lately?'' he asked. ”You two had f-ueh ]>rett\ hat*“ <>_: 1-.>1 Sim day,” he said. “One day I must take you. up in the a.r .vllL me/” he said. “'”Would Louie be frightened?" he ti.-ked.

It was with a rosy spot in each of her soft cheeks that the girl finally escaped, and with the utmost discretion inhered Ma: \ into the dining-room, lit the candles there, and closed the door softly upon them. Once back in the kitchen with Louie, she burst out:

“It's that nice-looking Mr. Barter, I declare, that Miss Mary ought to marry! What's the use of her keeping company and acting soft with a queer one like that Mr. Crow? Mr. Barter is a real gentleman, he is. She's gone to him now—don't make such a noise, Lou! Maybe if you stopped goilumping round on those creaky shoes we could hear them talk in there.”

The sisters Rogers advanced into the passage and stood listening. Not otherwise might a pair of white doves, perched upon a roof, have watched their young lady's casement close tight behind an adventurous gallant. Lily had forgotten, in her appreciation of the sly Barter, to fetch the lamp she had referred to, so it was by no brighter light than that of two tall silver candles standing between several vases of daffodils, that the two natives of Norfolk exchanged their confidences over the dying fire. Barter sat in the faded leather arm-chair of Miss Drew's father, while Mary crouched on the rug at his feet.

The girl was sadder than usual that night She spread out her strong hands over the fading coals and lifted her chin towards the figure of the man in the arm-chair. The flickering glow irradiated her dusky hair, touched the sad circles under her grey eyes, fell upon her parted lips and made her white teeth shine.

“No, she isn't as pretty as she was,” thought Barter and a shameless comparison between what it would be like to have Mary “between him and the wall” and Lily Rogers, passed through his mind.

“My goodness!” he thought. “But I suppose Lily would be like a cold flower-stalk; whereas this girl-------”

“I've come to think I'm one 01 the biggest fools in town,” he remarked.

“Why, Tom?” she murmured wearily0

“I was an ass not to rush you off, Mary, and get married before old John turned up! You'd have had your friend Tom, wouldn't you, you lovely creature?”

"What's wrong with you, Tom?1* she asked abruptly. He looked at her sharply.

“Nothing,” he said, “what are you talking about? Nothing's wrong with me.”

“When I think of your life sometimes.'” she said, “between the office and that awful room of yours, I can hardly bear it.” This she said gravely and intensely, looking in his face; and every syllable of it was true; for this man had become like a brother and more than a brother to her; and yet as she looked at him now, in that familiar, grey office suit, actually wearing a purple tie she had chosen for him at Wollop's, when John was no more than a name, she could have found in her heart to wish that she had never seen him; never known that such a person as Tom Barter wTas in the world. It was an odd feeling to look up at him now, sitting there so easy and natural in old Mr. Drew's leather chair, and say to herself—“There's the man who couldn't bring himself to marry me!”

He had been, all along, a fatal apparition in her life. Yes, he was an unconscious nemesis; although their relations had been so innocent*

She remembered an occasion at Thorpe, near Norwich, when, sitting with her mother by the river b&^k watching a barge go by, the older woman had suddenly said, “You're a deep nature, Mary. Your danger won't come from any little ripples on the tide of your life. It will come from large things bearing down-like that barge.”

This man sitting there opposite her now wTas just like that barge on their native river, which her mother had noticed, coming so strongly and massively forward with the tide.

“It's no good hiding it from each other, Tom,” she began now, “we old friends had better be frank with each other. Neither of us are happy in our life. You're sick to death of running Philip's business for him and flying his plane for him. You long to be on your own; to whistle Philip and his affairs down the wind and be your own master, I'm bored to death by Miss Drew and everything in this house. Sometimes I think of ieavlnc: John and all the rest of them here, and of getting a place somewhere else. Glastonbury doesn't suit me any better than it suits %ou: though I have, I confess, come to like these ruins a little better than we did at the beginning. Do you remember how we hated it all Tom?”

Her eyes shone so strangely now as she looked up at him, that the wild idea came into Barter's head that if he pressed her in one grand coup she might even, out of pique for John's neglect, throw John over and allow herself to be carried off by him, carried back to Norfolk perhaps, if he dared to chance it!

“No,” she went on, “no, old friend. You and I are both pretty miserable, this fine Spring! Come, confess to me, Tom, wasn't it because you were feeling lonely that you came to me tonight? I'm feeling lonely myself, to tell you the truth, and it does m good to see your solid, old Norfolk face in this weird place! What would we not give, Tom, you and I, for a breath of real east wind, coming up sharp and salt from the North Sea?”

His face had something about it at this moment so like the face of a reticent school-boy who wants to cry but is ashamed to cry, that, moved by an impulse that surprised herself, she scrambled to her feet and coming up to him sat down on the arm of his leather chair, placing her hand lightly on his shoulder to balance herself, and smiling sadly down upon him.

"A breath from the East Coast is what we want, Tom, old friend! Am I not right? This holy earth with its hundreds of saints and its scores of kings is a bit sickly to us sometimes, isn't it? That arch-conjurer Geard has got such a hold on John, that he doesn't seem to feel the oppression, does he? He's got John as fast as he got our grandfather. He's in there now—Lily told

you, I expect? Even Miss Drew treats him with—with------But I don't like him. There's something about him that makes me feel shivery and funny—as if he were a great toad. Poor old Tom. This isn't a very nice world, is it?"

She did a thing then that astonished herself as much as it astonished the object of her gesture—she lightly touched the man's forehead with the tips of her firm fingers, pushing back his stubbly hair. He made a sort of fumbling movement to take possession of this friendly hand; but the girl slipped quickly then off his chair's arm, and went over to the mantelpiece against wThich she leaned her elbow.

“John is fonder of you in one way than he'll ever be of me— even if we were married,” she said gravely.

Barter thought he had never seen grey eyes look so large and dark and appealing as hers looked now.

“She's getting at me, to make it up between them” he thought; and the idea that all this kindness in her tone was just to cajole him, made something grow rough as a peat-brick beneath his ribs.

“What the deuce are you talking about, Mary?” he said sulkily, »rubbing his face with both his hands as an angry, independent, proud boy might do, who had been kissed by a woman who was ^tempting to play the mother over him.

“You're not such a fool,” she said, “as not to know that he's desperately fond of you?”

“Oh, old John's all right,” he muttered awkwardly, thinking in his mind, “This is the worst of these clever women. They're always probing people with what they call psychological questions. I'll never come and see her again! I'll take Tossie Stickles out to Bushey Combe tomorrow night. It's no use! I ought to have known it wTas no use coming to her. She only wants to play some game with me to get at John—John'll be helpless in her hands if she does get hold of him.”

Her next question made him jerk up his back very straight in the leather chair and draw his eyebrows together till they made a continuous line across his browr.

“What made you think you liked me enough to want to marry me, Tom?”

He looked first to the right of her dark-flashing eyes and white cheeks and then to the left. His expression at that moment so exactly resembled that of a great Newfoundland dog, whom she had troubled with her gaze, that she smiled at him with renewed sweetness.

“You're a dear. Tom; do you know it?” she said, taking her elbow off the chimney-piece. “I like you a lot better than you ever liked me. I could have made you happy, Tom, if I'd married you: a good deal happier. Fin afraid, than ]']] ever i::ako !iim. And yet, my dear. I'd see you dead in \ou: c^ftiu ... i: ... if ... if I could pluck out of you . . . \\hate\ei- il is?”—her heaw. lower lip began trembling a little—“whatever it is that John likes in you so much more than-------”

She bit her lip and lifting her head back, stretched out her arms, clenching her hands.

“Oh, dear, it's a business, isn't it, old Tom, this affair of being alive?”

She let her arms drop to her sides with a sigh that heaved through her whole body. Tom Barter rose slowly to his feet. He felt now that he had wronged her with his vulgar suspicions. After all, she was laying bare her heart to him. She was a good, honest Norfolk girl. Perhaps what she said ivas true. Perhaps she could have made him happy.