s, he thought, repeated themselves a great deal.

He fell asleep as it seemed only a few minutes before the landlord,
accompanied by a great smell of frying bacon, came to call him.

18

The second day opened rather dully for Benham. There was not an idea
left in his head about anything in the world. It was--SOLID. He walked
through Bramley and Godalming and Witley and so came out upon the purple
waste of Hindhead. He strayed away from the road and found a sunny place
of turf amidst the heather and lay down and slept for an hour or so. He
arose refreshed. He got some food at the Huts Inn on the Hindhead crest
and went on across sunlit heathery wildernesses variegated by patches of
spruce and fir and silver birch. And then suddenly his mental inanition
was at an end and his thoughts were wide and brave again. He was
astonished that for a moment he could have forgotten that he was vowed
to the splendid life.

"Continence by preoccupation;" he tried the phrase....

"A man must not give in to fear; neither must he give in to sex. It's
the same thing really. The misleading of instinct."

This set the key of his thought throughout the afternoon--until Amanda
happened to him.

CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ AMANDA

1

Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.

From Haslemere he had gone on to further heaths and gorse beyond
Liphook, and thence he had wandered into a pretty district beset
with Hartings. He had found himself upon a sandy ridge looking very
beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt was Harting
Coombe; he had been through a West Harting and a South Harting and read
finger-posts pointing to others of the clan; and in the evening, at
the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat down to consider
whether he should go back and spend the night in one of the two
kindly-looking inns of the latter place or push on over the South Downs
towards the unknown luck of Singleton or Chichester. As he sat down two
big retrievers, black and brown, came headlong down the road. The black
carried a stick, the brown disputed and pursued. As they came abreast of
him the foremost a little relaxed his hold, the pursuer grabbed at
it, and in an instant the rivalry had flared to rage and a first-class
dogfight was in progress.

Benham detested dog-fights. He stood up, pale and distressed. "Lie
down!" he cried. "Shut up, you brutes!" and was at a loss for further
action.

Then it was Amanda leapt int