it comes to the agony-point with us. Oh," she said, stretching out her hands, "if it were but this law and that law to think about, and not pain and misery in somebody's life, how easy it would all be! You can't

see that, can you?"

He could not, for a man like Roger exchanges the fears of nature which his savage forefathers knew, for fears of the great machinery of civilization that man has himself created, and which now, for all but the strongest, binds him in on every hand. The great trusts, the gigantic companies, the paraphernalia of justice, the pronouncements of great newspapers, the laws of social life;-all these are, to men of Roger's calibre, facts as all-powerful as his own hot blood or the sure march of death. man has by now clothed himself with fears of his own manufacture as with a garment. Something of this was clear to Wilmot, and she even rejoiced in knowing it, since it made her own power the stronger.

Civilized

"Oh," she laughed, "they are but gadflies, you know, these good people whom you fear so much."

"Ah," he flashed, "you've had experience, you see. I have not."

Then, as she winced, he said hastily, "Oh, forgive me. I oughtn't to have said that, but I'm not myself to-night."

"Nor am I," she answered, sitting down in a low wooden chair that stood by the hearth, where the fire, even in summer-time, was scarcely ever extinguished. "I'm not one woman, but a dozen to-night, I think."

In a flash, as she sat there in the low chair on which the bygone Hannaford women had nursed their children, he saw, with the heightened power of inward vision that comes in moments of nervous strain, why he could never bring her back to live at Ponsworthy, even if things ever so adjusted themselves that it would be possible to do so.

In that moment he tasted exile: the bygone Hannaford women must not be pushed from their stools.

She answered his unspoken thought. "See," she said in level tones, "you are a generous man, and, out of pity for a woman of whom you know nothing, you are willing to ruin yourself. Let me tell you what I can of the truth of me. At home, long ago as a girl, my mother and sisters used to call me the ugly duckling, because of my brown body and pale face. Nobody, they said, would ever care for me. Then, you see, when Dr. Borlace asked me to come to him, I thought it would be nice to prove them wrong. And "-in a lower voice, so that he had to bend forward to catch her words-" when I found 'twas true that he didn't care for me, I thought no one ever would."

"My darling!"

"Then I

"No, no, no! Wait," she said hoarsely. met. your cousin, and he cared. And I was hungry and forgot he was a boy-forgot that 'twas but curiosity in me, forgot that he must suffer. And when my child was blind I thought 'twas for my harshness to him. And that woman acted a lie to keep me longer in pain."

"Don't go on, child."

"I must. Qui s'excuse, s'accuse: good, I accuse myself -to you, for you have the right to hear. You have been generous. Roger, when I came here I ached, ached for my child, and I wanted to forget. You were my dram-drinking." Somebody laughed in the firelight. Roger scarcely knew which of them it was.

"Can't you understand?" she asked desperately. "I was always in pain, deep down in me, where I couldn't quite forget-except with you."

She was standing now, holding him back with the palms of her two hands on his breast. The rough feel of his tweed coat was comforting to them.

"And I? And he?"

"Ah," she said, turning away again, twisting tightly clasped hands, "he cared at last, he learnt to care for me." "Not as I do."

"No; not as you do. So many men, so many loves."

"And you?"

86 Ah, don't ask me."

"But I must; I will.

What else is there to ask?" "Ah, Roger, Roger, where are your gossips and your broken laws now? "Tis agony-point with you too."

But the next moment she touched the electric forces that spin the whirling globe of life down the ages, as he closed his lips on hers, and their pulses throbbed as one.

"Closer, closer, till you bring me death," she whispered. But the next second the bitter-sweet of passionate surrender ebbed into the acrid taste of disillusion.

"No, no," she said, as he would have found her lips again. "No, no; I cannot ruin two lives. You cannot bring me home here; here, where the good Hannaford women made the butter and nursed their babies. What should I teach your children, Roger, when they said their prayers to pray not to be like mamma? That would be it, wouldn't it? Would not all your life be on a lower level, all spoilt, if you took me? Your ideals all tarnished ?"

"In all the heavens that the good Hannaford women believed in," he said, swinging her off her feet, "there could never come a moment to you and me as good as this one."

"In all the whirling changes of life," she assented dreamily, "nothing so good as this."

Then she awoke. "Passion settles nothing," she said, slipping away from him. "What would you and I have to keep us together in the long years when you would only remember all you know of me, when I should think of what I have made him suffer? Ah, you would watch my

children for the lightness you hate in me. And I-I should remember how I failed in the one and only trust that was ever committed to me, to help a struggling man who sinned for me. Ah, Roger, you'd never sin for me."

"What do you call this, then?" he said brutally.

There was a tense silence that snapped a chain.

"Oh," she said quietly at last, "that's the truth I've been waiting for. I heard the truth about him from a woman he helped, now I hear the truth about you at last.”

"No," she said, standing in the doorway, "I'm sorry I should have broken up the tenor of your life here, for I understand that you blurted out your designs-your designs for the world's good," she mocked, "to your father. It was a pity so to reckon on my ruining everything for you. For, at any rate, it was entirely premature. If there is any ruin wrought in your life, it is yourself that is the author of it. Let every herring hang by its own tail. And for the ruin of Tony's life, we'll pick up the pieces together."

"And you'll tell him the truth; and if you do, do you think he'll take you back?"

"Take me back," she laughed, "yes, from the very streets." "You put him higher than me, for you would never have said that of me."

"No, never," she confessed, "for you feel for me in proportion to the world's judgment of me. I know that now. But with Tony, haggard face, tired eyes, sinful heart: they are always but the Me that he wants. And that love lasts to the very end. Oh, he cannot draw the heart of me out as you can, he never will. But something in me answers to something in him. I never knew it till I met you, and missed the answer in you. For you judge, you condemn; he's by the side of me. He casts level shadows with me, and not one is a shadow of turning."

CHAPTER XXXI

MAL D'AIMER

By noon next day Wilmot had reached the market-town of Dodonesse, halfway on the road to Challacombe. She determined to leave the train here and spend an hour or two, continuing her journey by steamer down the Dart as far as the village of Stoke Michael, whence she could again take train to Challacombe. By this means she would avoid reaching home in the full daylight, and might chance upon Johanna at Stoke Michael, for Johanna was by this time fast becoming to her what the keep used to be to a beleaguered garrison,

After the raw newness of the station Wilmot reached the High Street, with its rows of projecting "Butterwalks." Standing beneath the ancient North Gate, that spans the street like a bridge, she looked through its narrow needle-eye at the crowds below, for all the space called the "Plains," opposite the Seven Stars Hotel, was a sea of heads. It was a large market that day, and with difficulty she had forced her way through the crowd, whose faces, lined with exposure and reddened with high fare and spirit-drinking, stood out against the brilliant sunlight with the virile insistence of Assyrian sculpture. Between the old houses of the long main street that descends the hill towards the bridge, loudvoiced prosperity surged against a background of clatter from the steaming doors of eating-houses. The fierce, battering nerve-siege of crude humanity began to creep insidiously over the lonely spectator. She was tired and