than febrifuges, is also, so the doctor maintained, Nature's method, and therefore less likely to be harmful to the life forces.

On his way back from Varcoe the doctor stood watching the yellow reflections cast by the lamps on the oily surface of the tide that lapped against the quay steps. The harbour basin was crowded with the craft by which the town lives. Rising and falling to the swell, the dark hulls rocked, cordage creaked in the night stillness, and all around the great bay outside a ring of shore lights marked the water-edge.

Upwards from the harbour rise the weather-worn houses, roofed and often slated on the walls with old grey Devon slate; the town seems from the hill above like a steaming cauldron of greyness, throwing up vapour in the form of chimney reek. Never a garden space is there, scarcely a green tree, or an ivy-covered wall, for the town is sea-born and lives by the bounty of the water. The hills, too, on which it stands are honeycombed with caves, where the drip of hidden springs still forms on the walls and floors monstrous shapes of stalactites and stalagmites. Windswept, for its headland juts into the Channel, much prosperity was to be expected when the new railway should open up the town for health-seekers and start fresh markets for the fish in great cities. The town, whose name is said to be derived from the Hebrew Chalakim, "place of a stone," was just now seething with the excitement of a new railway line and a possible new water supply.

In small, isolated towns the mental atmosphere, being home-made, is simpler in its constituents than the same article in wider, more sophisticated communities. In Challacombe there were but two classes: the fisher people, swayed by the primitive savagery of desire and hate, but dominated, too, by the master virtues of loyalty to kin and tenderness to suffering; and the small tradespeople, less ignorant, but far more enslaved to the baser items of this world's profit and loss.

But the forces upward and outward towards a wider life than the merely personal were as active here as in national life itself. Of the two roads of expansion, the emotional and the intellectual, the church of St. Peter the Fisherman offered, with its chants and incense and lights, the emotional; and the Methodist chapel, the way of salvation by taking thought. In the church the burly trawlers rolled up the aisles with banners, or knelt, child-like, in front of the symbols of a passionate humility that matched the mystery of the life in themselves that tore their heart-strings at sight of a dying child, or throbbed in their temples before an enemy. For the chanted music knows so well the way man treads that stairway of his passion, up to the heights of love and down to the depths of hate.

The chapel, too, was crowded, but mainly from the shop parlours, where they dread instinctively the emotions that may blight as well as quicken, and seek the ordered righteousness, whose bane is hair-splitting and casuistry. Yet upward and outward, led both chapel and church, by the road of the intellect or the emotion.

To such as these the new ideal brought by Dr. Borlace must needs seem strange, for into the most intimate relations of their life the scientist, humble though he may be in his own field, must bring a new vision of life-the ordered arrangement of the physical under the rule of certain law, a renaissance in miniature. In a word, drains, not incense; dustbins, not conviction of sin-a nineteenth-century reformation, requiring its Luther or its Calvin, or, perhaps preferably, the human tact of a Melanchthon. But if the light-bearer be neither Luther, Calvin, nor Melanchthon?

Suddenly the doctor's eye caught a huddled mass of what he took at first sight to be fishing-tackle, flung down at the bottom of the steps. Yet it is an extraordinarily clumsy fisherman who throws his gear about in that fashion, and

Dr. Borlace, stepping hastily down, bent over the dark mass. It was the body of a man asleep. Lighting a match, the doctor looked closer; across the jersey was embroidered the word "Blaane," which appeared to be Norwegian, and by the side of the man lay an empty bottle. But Dr. Tony had noticed something further, for hastily dropping the match, he stood for a second, seeing reflected in the water the hideous growth on the man's face. "Smallpox," said he to himself, "and the crew have turned him adrift with a bottle. He's been rowed in to-night, and his ship is far enough off by this time."

The doctor was tired, and the workhouse isolation hut stood at the top of the hill, but there was no help for it. Up the road he dragged the man, after arousing him with difficulty, and then spent a good half-hour jangling and clashing the workhouse bell.

Some time later Wilmot was aroused for the third time that night by the scraping of boots on the cockle-shells of the path below her window, as the doctor returned home. This time rage possessed her at the disturbance of her rest, and she hurried down to expostulate. For a moment she

stood watching him, herself unseen.

Alas! for anti-vaccination principles: the lymph was handy, the arm hung by Dr. Borlace's side, and grim fear lurked in the recesses of his person.

Wilmot turned and went upstairs again without a word: he had just vaccinated himself, though she knew he professed disbelief in it. But Tony never really knew his own mind, she told herself, with nose in air.

"took

It remains to be said that Dr. Borlace's arm capitally, and the Norwegian sailor's case turned out to have been wrongly diagnosed. Wilmot noted, too, that the photographs of "vaccination results" disappeared from amongst the fair copies of proposals.

So by our little weaknesses do our wives have us in derision.

G

CHAPTER X

FEMINA FURENS

It is only a mean hound of a captain who refuses to stand by when he has run a boat down. After pondering this fact for a while, Captain Penrice considered it to be plainly his duty to visit Mrs. Rouncevell.

"Everything's nothing," said he, preparing for the journey to St. Piran's, "when you come to grasp it. The worst snorter that a wind-jammer ever weathered was naught to a man's fancy of it."

No one is more consciously philosophical than the man who knows his cucumber is going to be very bitter.

Mrs. Rouncevell was more gaunt than ever, and her dress shabby even to the unobservant eyes of the old shipbuilder, though the room was polished to the point of sparkle. The tyranny of furniture, in fact, possessed her, and she spent her empty days sweeping, cleaning, and turning out cupboards. She lived completely alone, for Tryphena had been dismissed, and the passion of parsimony had taken, as often happens in lonely women's lives, the place of all the higher impulses of self-gratification. The fields of St. Piran's had been let, and only the garden remained to her. This she cultivated with her own hands, getting her most pleasurable sensation from the fact that its produce, with the eggs of a few hens, almost supported her, for the hoarding instinct, which is not the same as the gaining one, had the upper hand now. She would not, indeed, have speculated with her money, even though she had been assured that it would

breed rapidly.

A few pennies saved by self-denial gave more joy than ten per cent., so that it was a pleasure to live on blackberries and mushrooms that cost nothing, and to know that her store of apples and potatoes would serve to keep her alive through the winter.

"Mrs. Rouncevell," said the captain, devoutly wishing himself elsewhere," you know who I am, I think. My niece couldn't make up her mind to come and see you, and I felt you couldn't be left entirely alone by all our family-after what happened in the summer. So here I am."

Inwardly Mrs. Rouncevell was palpitating with anxiety lest her secret had been discovered, for she had steadily for months been keeping to herself the knowledge that Archelaus was alive, though she could not have clearly given her reasons for so doing. She shrank always from the conscious knowledge of her own reasons for any action. Archelaus had, therefore, been directed to address all his letters to the care of her sister, and under a Midland postmark they always reached her at Bottreaux, for Canadian postmarks might have caused gossip in the village.

"It was you," she said, "who brought up Wilmot Borlace. But I don't see what there can be between us now."

"Oh, my dear soul," said Captain Penrice, dropping all pretence of formality, "there isn't anything my little girl wouldn't give to undo the past. It'll be a shadow on her all her days, the mischief she did-innocently, as I believe; thoughtlessly, I know."

"Wantonly's truer, Captain Penrice, since it's naming things you're after."

She stood up and leaned, trembling, on the table that stood between them.

"And if it's a shadow to her, just ask yourself what it is to me to have him gone. It's worst when I open up the