take care of what you're doing, Johanna? You'll not throw yourself away?"

"Why are you in such a taking about me?" asked Johanna, wonderingly.

Because," said Wilmot, leaning over to speak in her ear, "I think you came in time to save me from some day seeing that look you spoke of on a man's face."

The seven planets and the nine orders of angels had resolved themselves into the figure of the Magdalen, just one of the many dusty answers given to the soul—

"When hot for certainties in this our life."

For a long time after Johanna had left, Wilmot sat with her lips drawn to a tight thread and with eyelids narrowed like snake-slits in the effort at mental compression. At last she moved, and, leaning out of the low window, listened to the wind in the branches. After the rain the air resounded with the gurgles of streamlets hurrying down to the river; the leaves, too, were wet, as brother leaf touched brother in the wind. The lap of waters and the sweeping winds sent pulses of pain through her as she saw how she had shrunk from Dr. Tony, repelled him; saw, now that the woman in her was awake, what the man in him must have had to suffer. Passionately she held herself in fancy between the doctor and the baying world that had gathered round him. Lips of her, touch of her, what had they ever been worth to any one, save to comfort?

It had come to a simple question now, which of the two men would suffer most? A much plainer issue than any talk of this commandment or that, for in that devil's wedlock of sin and pain it was now a mere matter of less or more of pain to one or other.

CHAPTER XXX

THE END OF A DREAM

LACKING the spur of discomfort, Roger Hannaford had remained a dreamer, for whose self-satisfaction it was enough that he had once dreamt dreams and seen visions. The mere idea of bringing to a few strugglers something of the comfort, health, and peace which the elbow-room of the moor offers was such a joy to him that at last the idea of the struggle itself became a sort of pleasurable background to his visions. Without it the world would have been a distinctly poorer place to him. In this rather ghoulish attitude he by no means stood alone, for the spectacle of social misery and the discussion of the way out is to many nowadays but an ingredient of extra interest in life, always providing that they are not brought into direct personal contact with it. In this ecstatic contemplation of other folks' miseries, Roger had passed many years, with considerable satisfaction to himself, feeling fully content to wait for his own control of his father's estates in order to begin the working of his schemes of help. Meanwhile there was creeping upon him middle-age, that painful time when a man begins, perforce, to count the weaknesses of character that he has unwittingly encouraged in himself, as he reckons the physical sprains, the sprung tendons and over-taxed muscles due to youthful recklessness. Worst of all, there begin to crawl over him the dreary mists through which sounds the warning bell that rings "Cui Bono" in the ears.

Satisfied so with dreams, he had waited for the woman

who was to share with him the long-deferred fulfilment of vision. Now it seemed that she had come, but the coming was in strange guise. For Wilmot was neither the woman of whom he had dreamt, nor did the way to win her seem possible to him in the sober light of day. She contradicted all the cherished traditions of himself and his forebears: she was wayward, freakish, showing a supreme disregard of those restrictions which the countryman holds in far greater awe than does the townsman. To juggle with the social "Thou shalt not" was to Roger the act of a light woman, yet he could not altogether so condemn her, for she was too quick in sympathy with other lives to show the self-absorption of the merely reckless.

In the upheaval of his ideas that Wilmot had wrought, it was he who ultimately felt condemned in his own eyes, he who had let "I dare not" wait upon "I would" all the days of his life. For dreams unfulfilled destroy manliness and eat away the very substance of character, till the warp and woof of a man's life fade into moth-eaten dust. To every man his visions, and according to the vision, so the man. For all men dream, only the practical man shapes his dreams in the solid stuff of fact, while the visionary is satisfied with the cloudy fancies of his soul. And, indeed, these cloudy fancies make up the man, for his thoughts are but external to him, the product of his century and nationality.

The finishing touch to this process in inward revelation was given to Roger by the interview with Nosworthy. For of what cowardliness had he not been guilty that Wilmot's name should be sullied by such lips as those? In the excess of his zeal he even lost sight of Wilmot's own share in the story, for she, at any rate, had put all to the test, to win or lose; had, in fact, done what he had never found courage to do.

Raw haste, the Nemesis of the dreamer, came upon

him here, and he went straight to his father and told him in the plainest language how he proposed using the estates after they had passed into his hands.

"Waiting for dead men's shoes, eh?" said the old man. "If you choose to put it so. But if I use it all to an end you would disapprove of, after all, 'tis but what nine sons out of ten do."

"Only, my boy," said Mr. Hannaford, grimly, "I'll say this for 'em, they aren't in general such fools as to saddle the horse before they've caught 'en."

"I want to play straight, that's all."

"Ye'll do it with noan of my land or money, of that you may take your davy. For I'd rather sow Ponsworthy deep in thistles than turn it into a nesting-place for wastrels. And ye'll not do it after I'm gone, either, for I'll will it all away to the John Hannafords as sure as my name's Roger Hannaford Senior."

"You'll do as you please, father," said Roger, curtly, turning on his heel.

"And Roger Hannaford Junior may sell oranges from door to door," shouted the old man after him. "But," he muttered to himself, "I'd give a crown to know what's moved him to come chattering like a jay."

That evening Mrs. Rouncevell arrived from St. Piran's, and after he had heard her story, Mr. Hannaford was able to give a shrewd guess at the cause of his son's extraordinary candour.

"So that's the flea that bit Roger," he observed reflectively, when he had heard her out. "But if you come in answer to my letter, why the dickens didn't you come before? Here's weeks it's been unanswered."

"I shut up St. Piran's and left no address. It was waiting for me when I got back after burying my poor sister." "Well, you have buried her," he said, with a rub of his

raspy chin, "and that's always a blessing, to think there's one old cat of a woman less upon earth. Oh, Lord, Lord, my dear soul, don't you go about with any false ideas. I don't. For you hate that poor little toad of a woman that's misled my son, till you can barely see out of your eyes. And if she's sinned, she'll suffer."

"And haven't I?" said Mrs. Rouncevell, fiercely. She had told the story fully, save for the omission of her own part in it—her silence to Wilmot about the escape of Archelaus from the death he had planned for himself.

"It's turned you as yellow as a guinea," said Mr. Hannaford, genially.

That afternoon Wilmot had set out for an aimless walk, in which her steps took her instinctively towards Ponsworthy. Remembering that Roger himself was away at Ashbourne market, when once in sight of the ricks and granaries of the farm, she could not resist the temptation of going in to see old Mr. Hannaford: it would be an unspoken good-bye.

On the threshold of his room she recognized Mrs. Rouncevell's voice, but it was too late to draw back then, even had pride permitted such a thing.

"So you've come," said Wilmot to her; "it was like you. I expected you long ago."

"She came to spoil my chances, I suppose," she said, turning to the old man, who watched the two from the support of his stick-handle, with his face wrinkled into innumerable creases, like the loose folds of skin on the creature called a "cockiolly bird."

"Ay," he said laconically.

"And she's done it? She's told my story?" she asked, with a rising note in her voice.

"Ay," he said again.

"Roger already knows it. I told him," said Wilmot, catching her voice with a gulp.