than you've ever gone yet. Ay, and lower than I've ever gone yet either. For she's still all you want, body and soul of her. And I'm naught to 'ee save what I've been to others."

She laid her heaving shoulders across the table with its litter of cards and money. The doctor stood for a second looking at her.

"No," he said, half to himself, "you're right. I haven't failed altogether."

He closed the door softly behind him, and she heard him go heavily across the hall into Wilmot's den. Step by step he was leaving her life. It was to her the moment of fever that comes with the wound of battle, for the stings of longing wait for the moment that comes-after, when the long march stretches ahead into the dim darkness, so far that the waters of the river of death cannot be even faintly heard by the straining ears.

At last she lifted herself from the table, and began to gather the scattered coins into little heaps, dividing the one or two sovereigns from the silver and pence. Then she unfastened the bodice of her dress and took out a little green linen bag that she wore there. It contained all that she had won from the doctor during the weeks they had played together. The gold offered no temptation, but the pence and silver; there seemed so much of it-and there was the child. For a long time she held a handful of silver, thinking how much it would do. Besides, was not some of it legally hers, for certain weeks' wages still left unpaid? At last she swept it all into a heap, fetched paper and string from the kitchen, wrapped the whole sum up anyhow and directed it to Dr. Borlace. Then she went upstairs to her room.

Half an hour later she came into the dark consultingroom, holding up the candle steadily, like a Caryatid, as

she looked round the room. She was wrapped in a grey shawl and wore a hat. A lame dog that the doctor had been curing dragged itself forward to lick her left hand. She noticed that the doctor had fetched a plate of scraps for the poor waif, and wondered, in an agony of self-pity, that he should care for everything in the world except for her. "And yet," she said to herself, "I've never wanted anything so much as to feel his arms round me-me, first of all in all the world, and I match him too," she went on, stretching out her arms in front of her, "better than a weak little toad like that one. I wish he'd beat me, fair leather me, like father used to do. I'd rather far he'd do that than put me away all cold-like."

She began to wrench the shawl as it clung round her, but she mastered herself at last, and, opening the front-door softly, went out into the street. There she stood for a moment, looking up and down the deserted place, where the lamps flickered cheerlessly in the wind. There were no other lights to be seen, except a faint gleam of lamplight behind the Venetian blinds of Captain Penrice's sittingroom and the light from Wilmot's room downstairs, where the doctor was still sitting.

Struck by a sudden thought, she slipped across the road and knocked softly on the window of the captain's room. He would be sitting there alone, she hoped, and surely he might be able to advise her what was to be done. After an eternity of waiting, he came to the door to look out.

"Let me come in," whispered Johanna, "I must speak to you."

She thought he hesitated a moment in the hall, but finally he led her into the sitting-room, where she saw the cause of his hesitation, for Mrs. Penrice stood by the table looking startled. As the clock on the mantelpiece showed, it was long past midnight.

"Johanna," said the captain, sternly," what's it all about, and why are you wandering about at night like this?"

"Oh, I'm going off of my own free will," she said, rage at the universe in general possessing her. "I've not been turned out, as you seem to think. I'm going to put an end to all this, for it's gone on long enough. Here you've been leaving Challacombe and him, just when you was most wanted, and when things have tied themselves into a knot, you want to know what it's all about. This is what it's all about. I'm cloam, and she's fine china, so I can't do her work any longer. I'm going to fetch back his wife, that's what I'm going to do. What you ought to have done months ago."

"You're meddling with what you don't understand,” said the captain, looking at his wife. "Dorothy, I don't think there's any call for you to stay up any longer. You can't do any good here.”

"Oh, you needn't send her away, because I'm not to breathe the same air with her. I only come now to ask you to step across. I'm all tore to bits inside me, and I don't know what's happening to the doctor. You go across to 'en and see if he's all right."

"What's been happening? And why are you dressed for going away?"

"I told you," she repeated sullenly, "I'm going to her. She ought to be back here."

"But why go now?" shrugged the captain.

"I was going in the morning. I'll walk the streets till the first train goes out. Here you've lived to be an old man, and don't know yet that sometimes the only way to save yourself is to run."

The captain hesitated, then turned his back on her: for once his charity had failed him. What the devil had everybody been about, he asked himself, while he had been away, to get things into this mess?

But his wife understood far better.

"No, no," she said, crossing the room, and laying a hand on Johanna's arm, "you'll stay here till it's time for the train. Richard," she said, looking at the captain imperatively, "we'll not let her go. For I understand, if you don't."

"No," said Johanna, drawing back, "I couldn't stay here. He wouldn't want me," she nodded to Captain Penrice, who, with shoulders hunched to his ears, watched them both from the hearthrug.

"He doesn't understand, but I do," said Mrs. Penrice, putting things, for the first time since her acquaintance with the captain, entirely out of his jurisdiction. "You came away to-night, because you wouldn't harm the doctor, for you care for him too much. Isn't that it, Johanna ?"

'And," said Johanna, looking awe-stricken, "I thought you were a hard old cat, without a bit o' nature to the make of 'ee."

Perhaps I was once, Johanna," laughed Mrs. Penrice, "but he's taught me better," she finished, pointing to the astonished captain, "for all he's so dull to-night. Come," she said, "you shall have the spare-room, and I shall lock you in. Then we'll get you away in the morning before the girl is about. Nobody will be a pin the wiser, and," she said with authority, " Richard, you'll just step across and see the doctor."

"Well, of all the astonishing" began the captain, but his wife quietly shut the sitting-room door behind her and left him. He had come to the amazement of the marriage

service.

CHAPTER XXIX

AT THE HANDS OF THE MAGDALEN

OVER Uppacott that same evening the moon in its first quarter gleamed gold-red through the light mists like a window-slit into the realm of light beyond; one star, green beside the ruddy sickle, watched above the tree-tops; in the distance the roar of the Dart was the only evidence of life. The air seemed asleep, held in suspension, waiting for the order which should call its forces into array for the next act in the elemental conflict, as Wilmot walked up and down by the gorge opposite Benjie Tor watching the wide-flung light fade into mist, the mist into starlight.

The watching star and the golden sickle grew clearer as her inward conflict emerged into plainer consciousness. It was by this time the old problem in a fresh form: out of all the universe, she asked herself again, does man alone fight his battle unaided, without help from any outside power?

All nature seems double: the moon and the star, the man and the woman, no lonely thing in all the world, nothing that rests on naught but its own strength-save the race of man. Help comes to him often, it is true, in strange unknown ways, air-borne, it seems, from other human souls, from the so-called dead maybe. And yet is there nothing outside man, higher, because all-knowing, to answer to his call in need? Wilmot asked the old question, pondering certain books she had read under Dr. Borlace's influence, the last word of destructive criticism, that traces the idea of the divine to no answering reality outside humanity, but to