through her veins. The need for action, for taking the initiative, always difficult to the natural woman, had come. She had waited on this man's action or on that, and only once, and that by impulse, not purpose, she had taken the lead. Now she knew that the direction of three lives lay with her and with no one else, for she, who had long watched for heroism in Dr. Borlace, had now to seek for plain, straight dealing in herself. And the sting of wrong-doing she felt now that one can never put things right by any willingness to suffer in one's self, for by the great devil's wedlock of evil and pain, one can never suffer alone. The question now was, not whether she could escape suffering and lay hands on joy, for she must suffer either way. The question was— which man would suffer least, which one needed her most?

She knew the answer, for the baby lips of the lamb brought it. How could she forget her child, dead, yet claiming her still in memory? The lamb's touch spoke of things more ancient far than the mere household intimacy she had shared with the doctor and his child. Yet she knew this was no answer, for Tony had shown no anxiety about her all these months, had never given up anything for her, above all had never sinned to please or win her. Sinned much, loved much; it is the final test in the way of this curst star.

And Roger must sin to gain her. The light broke upon her mind, like the light that comes from the west, with the lightening of the cloud-folds, over the sullen green of trees when the summer is dying-a light that makes the newturned furrows gleam like living velvet, that threatens, yet is clearer than the clear-shining of the noon-rays.

CHAPTER XXVI

SHADOWS

THE Countryman is usually left untouched by the first infirmity of common minds, that zeal for incessant activity, whether well or ill directed, which dogs the Puritan Teuton all his days, for he has learnt, through long watching of the slow process of seed growth and generation, that "doing" is something different from incessant uprooting and replanting, and that life is a thing to be savoured delicately, not bolted greedily. On the other hand, it is rare also to find among country folk any one who has developed the new sense that has given fresh meaning to life in tens of thousands of townsmen-that feeling of personal responsibility for the condition of the world in the days that are and the days that are to come. For the evils of life must be monstrous, intolerable, they must hit one in the eye, ere they strike the imagination of any but the finest spirits. Town life, therefore, makes the evil visible, while the comparative peace of country life does not.

Roger Hannaford was one of the few countrymen who have been struck with the evil and the thought of a possible cure. This extra sensitiveness was due to no triumph of the imagination, but to education, and, in a certain degree, to experience. For at the time that the second Mrs. Hannaford was alive, it had been intended to get him work in town, and he had even for a short time done clerk's work in Manchester. What he had seen there had made a lasting mark on his nature, especially after his introduction to certain writers on political economy and social history. He

had come to the conclusion that the cure must lie not only in "back to the land," but that the exodus to the land must be captained by countrymen. He contemplated, in short, a new lying down of the lion with the lamb, of the countryman and the townsman, for the joint purpose of solving some of the industrial troubles of the time. The age's work, in which he was minded to take his part, meant to him the union of the opposite pole of things, townsman and countryman, farmer and labourer, capitalist and operative; for purposes of common good, he might, perhaps, have added the union, for the common well-being, of two beings, never yet really yoked in the world's work—woman and man.

But if Roger was a "hop out of kin" in one way, his father was no less so in another. Old Mr. Hannaford was of those who cannot rest, to whom it has become stuff of the conscience to go on doing, and, working as he did with easy-going souls all around him, he had made a very tidy fortune in a small way. Now that he was partly paralyzed and laid by, mentally, with religious mania, he was none the less determined to work, vicariously, in the person of his son, and still with the same aim-the further enlargement of his lands, his cattle, his barns and garners. It was here that the two met in conflict, to the complete defeat of the younger man as far as anything but persistent, longdelayed purpose went. It could not well be otherwise, for the elder man had the whip hand completely in his grasp -the means, the far easier purpose, the more persistent temperament, the greater impetus derived from forces long turned in a given direction.

Life is made up of strange alternations, and the scenes of a man's experience range from the hall of the Parthenon to the back kitchen. On the morning after the party at Ponsworthy Roger found himself trying to face the facts of

his position. According to the unbusiness-like country fashion, he was neither a partner with his father, nor the legally appointed manager of Ponsworthy, though the whole superintendence of it rested on his shoulders. Although at his father's death he would be a well-to-do man, yet he could not now, at middle age, count on a regular salary, or even a certain percentage of profits for his own use, and to set a wife down at the farm without a definite income by means of which living on a more refined scale could be introduced, would be to set her down among the habits of another and a coarser time. For the chief difficulty between one generation and another is, not the adjustment of abstract opinions, but of daily habits; a difference of opinion on the doctrine of the Trinity is a mere trifle, for practical purposes, compared with different views on shaving, hair-cutting, and the opening of windows, in those who have to live in the same house with one another. In these matters, though old Mr. Hannaford never came downstairs, he set the tune for the whole household. He had allowed certain alterations to be made in the conduct of business, though he constantly girded at these changes, but this was only because he could not help himself. One of these alterations was the keeping of regular account books, for, as he always boasted, during his active rule he had been able to carry in his head the record of the sales, profits, and losses for several years; new-fangled ways were just an excuse for imbecility on the part of the present generation, in his opinion.

The test of every man's quality is his attitude towards failure and misery, either in himself or others; whether he fights it, exploits it, ignores it, or sinks under it. Out of the infinite complexity of the universe each man seizes, artistlike, the material that shall build his nature. For this reason nothing short of infinite complexity, both of the

material and spiritual, is needed to satisfy the instincts of the myriads of human creatures that pass across this planet. Suffering, struggle, agony, are materials no less needed than joys, for flaming suns and dying weeds alike supply bricks for each man's life-work, the building of his own temperament.

Old Mr. Hannaford was of those who use the failures of others, not cruelly, but automatically; all his life he had hit the mark in the small things he undertook, all his life he had profited by the failures of others to hit their mark. He had succeeded so long that it seemed to him at last that man is always the master of misery, provided that he fight strongly. Then, when his wife and children were struck from him at a blow, he thought himself the one exception of the universe, for the very tool of trouble that he had used as an instrument was now used to strike him down, he who had reckoned himself, not the slave, but the master of pain. He even found a sort of exaltation in the idea that he alone out of all the world's millions stood apart from the guerdon won by the divine sacrifice. "Not for me, O Lord, not for me:" it could not be otherwise, since the very laws of the universe had been defied in his case.

"Father, I've something to say to you, something I want to talk over with you," said Roger, after the old man's midday meal had been cleared away.

He sat leaning forward on his stick by the side of the deal table where his book and spectacles lay. One of his peculiarities was a habit of scoring out and correcting passages in everything he read. A huge worm-eaten fourposter bed filled one corner of the room, with a smaller bed in the opposite corner for the lad who waited on him. The room was strangely bare, being uncarpeted, and only containing the clumsiest of bedroom furniture.

"Well?" said he, wrinkling his stubbly face into a

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