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But Mary continued obstinately staring out of the window into the round half-circle of trimly weeded gravel, surrounded by thick laurel bushes from which a winding driveway led to the gate. The window was open at the top; but not content with this, she presently pulled aside the muslin curtains and opened it at the bottom. She now stood there motionless, listening intently, while the warm August air stirred her gown and, entering the room, made the candles flicker.

Several little brown moths took the opportunity of flying in past her white figure. Some rushed to perish at the candles on the table, while others beat themselves against the lamp till they fell upon the floor. Neither Miss Drew nor her companion had any margin of consciousness left for these little suicides of blind desire. Miss Drew's thoughts flickered much more wildly than the softly fluttering curtains or the lightly stirred folds of her companion's frock.

They were a strange jumble, these thoughts; a jumble of old, conservative prejudices and passionately covetous longings; longings rendered intensely concrete and circumscribed by reason of their long suppression.

“Mamma .#. . Mamma . . . never sit on sofas . . . weakness to sit on sofas . . . hold your back straight now . . . straight Euphemia . . . Betty Newton in hay-loft . . . kissing . . . Mamma . . . angry like God . . . God sees all . • . he will hold her all night ... a sneak ... a tramp ... a trickster ... a thief . . . friend of Geard . , . Geard meddling with Chalice Well . . . Geard letting loose all the devils . . . burning . . . burning . . . Betty Newton . . . Mamma . . . bed all day . . . bread and water ... too long, too long, too long . . . sweet ... so very sweet . . . and for him, all for a dirty trickster . . . no one knows how sweet but me ... too old now . . . old . . . old . . . never sit on sofas . . . weakness . . . hold your hack straight, Euphemia ... a dirty adventurer must have her . . . hard she is . . . hard to me . . . soft as clay to him . . . it burns ... it would be only once . . . peace, rest . • . lovely, heavenly peace! . . . her red sash . . . it burns . . . Lily and Rogers in bed . . . never knocked . . . never rang . . . everything changed since that man became Mayor . . . Chalice Well . . . blood . . . her sash . . . red blood . . . it burns . . . never for me . . . after this . . . never for me . . . she'll be gone soon . . . listening for him out there . . . gone . . . gone ... a maid no more . . . it burns . . . Lily and Rogers in bed . . . two pillows . . . slept watching . . . watching slept . . . mamma . . . grand-mamma . . . crying all night . . . never came . . . never heard ... it burns and burns and burns.”

“I couldn't be happy in our room tonight,” thought Mary. “And after all—no! I'll do it. The poor woman! It's better than giving her white geraniums to hold in her hand.”

She shut the window with a violent jerk of her strong bare arms. She turned and came slowly, gravely, gently, towards the figure by the mantelpiece. She came close up to Miss Drew and threw her arms round her as she would have thrown them around a wounded animal.

“I'll stay,” she whispered softly to her, “I'll stay, dear!”

The rush of wild excitement, relief, passion, shame, the motion of racing blood from heart to nerves, brain, throat, were too much for the wrought-up feelings of the woman.

Her head sank down, like the head of a reed in the water when a sluice is opened, and upon Mary's shoulders her tears fell now without stint, while a queer whimpering, like the crying of a child whose mother has suddenly appeared among a crowd of strangers, showed signs of changing into hysterical laughter.

“Come and lie down, dear . . . There! I'm not going to leave you . . . not for one moment . . . my poor, poor darling! Come and lie down . . . only just a minute.”

Thus murmuring, Mary half-dragged, half-supported her till she got her safe upon the sofa . . . upon that very sofa where “”Mamma“ had so often told the little Euphemia that it was ”weakness“ to recline. Then the girl's practical mind began to work fast. ”I must“ she thought, ”run out and tell John. Fd better go and get hold of Lily. Oh, mercy! Her eyes are shutting! I hope she's not going to faint."

Thrusting a pillow under Miss Drew's head, Mary ran to the door, unlocked it and hurried down the passage. She had shut the door carefully behind her; but even so, she did not want the lady to hear her shouting for help.

“Lily!” she called gently.

There was no answer; but she thought she detected the sound of hurried movements and disturbed voices in the far distance.

“Lily! Louie! Where are you?”

Then she heard the unmistakable sound of a man's voice—the voice of Mr. Weatherwax. She opened the kitchen door. “Come here, Lily, come quick, please; I want you! Miss Drew's ill!”

There was bread and cheese upon the kitchen table and also— Mary noted it with a house-wife's indignation, even at that crisis! —the brandy decanter from the dining-room sideboard.

The scullery door opened—just wide enough to allow the entrance of a very slim virgin—and Lily, hurriedly pinning on her white cap, slipped into the kitchen, with eyes very wide and even her pretty mouth a little open.

“Oh, Lily, Miss Drew's unwell—I've made her lie down on the sofa; and I think------”

“La, Miss!—I mean Mam—does Mistress want the brandy? Mr. Weatherwax just dropped in to ask how we was off for vegetables, and Louie thought------”

“Listen, Lily. We must try and help Miss Drew upstairs, and get her into bed. I shall sleep with her tonight; so you can take my pillow and things into her room. One minute, Lily! Just go and tell Mr. Weatherwax not to go for a moment If she's too heavy for us, he could carry her up.”

“Yes, Mam; yes, Mrs. Crow.”

Mary hurried back into the drawing-room.

To her astonishment Miss Drew was standing by the mantelpiece again, but her whole manner was changed from what h had been. She was self-possessed now and very quiet.

“Come here, child,” she said.

Mary went up to her and she took the girl's head gravely between her hands and kissed her forehead.

“I've changed my mind,” she whispered, very dignified and commanding. “I wish you to go after all. Run out now quickly and tell that man to wait for you; and then come back and pack your things. And I shan't expect you back till Monday morning. I wish it, Mary! You must do what I tell you. I shall be absolutely all right. I shall get up early and go to St. John's.”

The curious thing about this long, hurried speech was thai Miss Drew never raised her voice above a whisper. Mary stared at her. The sight of their two untasted coffee-cups brought back so vividly the painful scene she had gone through that night, that this change in her employer's tone seemed dreamlike and unnatural.

But, before she had time to reply, Lily came quickly in without even a pretence at a knock.

“Lily,” said Miss Drew calmly, raising her voice now, so that it sounded quite as usual, “you know, of course, that Miss Mary is married?”

“Yes'm, Miss Mary told me, Mum.”

“But she's going to be with us, as before, Fm glad to hear,” Miss Drew went on, making several little movements with her hands among the objects on the coffee-tray—“that is, during the day-time. But Fve told her we'll be able to manage without her tomorrow; for we mustn't be selfish, must we, Lily?”

“Yes'm ... no Mum.”

But the lady of the Abbey House now turned to the extremely embarrassed Mrs. John Crow.

“Run out, dear, and tell your—good man, that we're all helping you to pack and that you won't keep him long.”

Dominated by the authority in her tone and spared any protest by the presence of Lily, Mary had nothing for it but to- obey her to the letter. She went to the door, which Lily gravely opened for her, and slipped out into the hall.

She did not soon forget her queer sensation—as if she had been turned into a bit of seaweed on the top of a great cresting wave of compulsion—as she looked hurriedly round for something to throw- round her- There ^\as a big, eighteenth-century mirror hanging in the hall; and in a flash of queer detachment as one of her hands mechanically went up to her hair, she thought to herself, “Women must have wrapped things around their white shoulders like this, while arrows were flying, guns firing, torches waving, men shouting, for hundreds and hundreds of years!” She opened the front door and descended the stone steps. Then, with the cloak she'd picked up clutched tight round her— more as a protection from the night, from obscure invasions of her nakedness, than for warmth in that summer air—she ran rapidly down the drive. Yes! There he was.

“No ... no! Not now, John!” she panted breathlessly, as he hugged her against him, almost lifting her off the ground in his thankfulness to have got her again. “There . . . there! Let me go, John!”—and when she was free—“I must go back now for my things ... I only came ... to tell you I was—” she could hardly get the words out in her agitation—“to tell you I was coming. You wait here, John-------”

She was off up the drive again, and out of his sight, almost before his unspeakable relief had found time to flow to his confused brain from the arms which had held her.

He could not remain still. Every pulse in his body was beating and his heart was as voluble as the French clock, still ticking behind Miss Drew, as she talked quietly to Lily. He set himself to pace up and down the road like a sentinel guarding some royal palace.

There were all sorts of vague delicious scents upon the soft air that rustled through the laurel bushes, stirred the wall-flowers in the crannies of the grey wall, went sighing off like the breath of an invisible spirit over the tops of the trees. But from some remote cowshed somewhere out towards Havyatt Gap, on the road to West Pennard, he could hear the pitiful cry of a beast in pain.

As this cry went on, tossed forth upon the summer night with woeful persistence, John stood and listened nervously, leaning upon his hazel-root stick.

“Damn!” he thought, “and it must be a pain like that, that this woman's enduring now, only in the heart ... in the heart . . . at my carrying off Mary! What a thing—that not one perfect day can be enjoyed by anyone without hearing something groan or moan! What would young Dekker be doing in my case? Well—it's clear what he'd be doing, by what he's done over Mrs. Zoyland! Cleared out of it . . . hands off . . . and spends his time between Paradise and Bove Town, comforting the sick.”

He resumed his sentry's march, but his mind was beating now against the blood-stained wedge of the world's pain, and he could not give up himself with absolute assent to his good hour.

He prodded the crumbling stonework of the wall with the end of his stick in angry pity: pity for Miss Drew, pity for that suffering beast on the West Pennard Road, pity for the whole array of anguished nerves upon which the great, blunt thumb of evil was strumming its nightly gamut amid these sweet summer scents.

Once more he listened intently. How hard not to listen! What was the trouble with that beast over there? What were they doing to it? What were he and Mary doing to Miss Drew? If only he knew that there were a God, who for one second had an ear open, what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy, stupid orifice. In the old days their gods made them sacrifice their enemies to propitiate the great pain-engine.

'Til put into old Geard's head,“ he thought, ”to barn an image of God, like a great Guy Fawkes, when he has his Festival of Christ's Blood."

He resumed his sentry's march. The suffering beast was silent now. He prayed that Miss Drew also was either rocking herself to sleep in a fit of hysterics or hardening her heart in pain-killing hate.

“But if everyone waited,” he said to himself, “to snatch their hour, till not a cry, a groan, a moan, could be heard in the whole world, who would ever be happy?” There! Wasn't that the opening of the front door? No! 'Twas one of those inexplicable noises that are liable to occur in all silent places, as though some ambushed eavesdropper struck something with his foot.

“What an awful mood Tom was in when I saw him yesterday! He doesn't seem to like it very much our being married. Perhaps I oughtn't to have asked him to the church. She said not to! Girls are wise in these things . . . wise . . . There! Thai surely teas the door? Yes, there are her steps! Oh. the darling! Oh. the heavenly darling!” He snatched the bag from her hands and laid it on the ground, flinging his hazel-stick after it. His whispers of rapture as he welcomed her, touching her, here, there, with his hands, as if to make sure that it was she and none else, drifted off among the other faint sounds of the night and went on their airy voyage eastward. The wind came from the west; so that, long after no human ear could have heard them, those sounds— or those vibrations that would have been sounds to more sensitive ears than man's—went journeying due east. Over the roofs of West Pennard and East Pennard they went; over Ditcheat and Milton Clevedon; over Cogley Wood and King's Wood Warren; over Monkton Deverill and Danes' Bottom; till they left the West-Country altogether; and were resolved into thin air somewhere beyond Stonehenge.

But Mary soon made him pick up her bag and his stick and set off down Silver Street.

“I was within an ace—an ace I tell you—of not coming tonight! In fact Pd told her I wouldn't come; and it was quite decided; when, all suddenly, she changed her mind and became absolutely generous. She just made me come, John, just made me!”

“Poor old thing!” he interjected at this point. And then he caught himself up. “Damn it, my swTeet, how self-complacent a person gets, in a second, when luck turns—but I can't help it; Pve got you! I've got you! I've got you!”

Mary smiled to herself in the warm velvety darkness that hung, like a great priestly alb, around the masonry of St. John's Tower; for she said in her heart: “How different women are from men! I suppose we all accept from our earliest childhood, this tragic division between the happy and the unhappy. Men seem to discover it, like a new light on things; and at once want to do something, or at least to make some grand sign of doing something!” But she forgot Miss Drew herself when they reached that door in the lamp-lit silence of Northload Street. John produced his latch-key.