Bunning, perhaps it will help you if you know the way that
I'm feeling about it. I'll try and explain. All these days there's
something in me that's urging me to go out and confess."

"Conscience," said Bunning solemnly.

"No, it isn't conscience at all. It's something quite different, because
the thing that's urging me isn't urging me because I've done something
I'm ashamed of, it's urging me because I'm in a false position. There's
that on the one side, and, on the other, I'm in love with Rupert
Craven's sister."

Bunning gave a little cry.

"Yes. That complicates things, doesn't it? Now you see why Rupert Craven
is the last person who must know anything about it; it's because he
loves his sister so much and suspects, I think, that I care for her,
that he's going to find out the truth."

"Does she care for you?" Bunning brought out huskily.

"I don't know. That's what I've got to find out."

"Because it all depends on that. If she cares enough it won't matter
what you've done, and if she doesn't care enough it won't matter her
knowing because you oughtn't to marry her. Oh," and Bunning's eyes
as they gazed at Olva were those, once more, of a devoted dog: "she's
lucky." Then he repeated, as though to himself, in his odd husky
whisper: "Anything that I can do . . . anything that I can do . . ."

2

On the next evening, about five o'clock, Olva went to the house in
Rocket Road. He went through a world that, in its frosty stillness,
held beauty in its hands like a china cup, so fragile in its colours, so
gentle in its outline, with a moon, round and of a creamy white, with a
sky faintly red, and stiff trees, black and sharp.

Cambridge came to Olva then as a very lovely thing. The Cambridge life
was a lovely thing with its kindness, its simplicity, its optimism. He
was penetrated too with a great sadness because he knew that life of
that kind was gone, once and for ever, from him; whatever came to him
now it could never again be that peace; the long houses flung black
shadows across the white road and God kept him company. . . .

Miss Margaret Craven had not yet come in, but would Mr. Dune, perhaps,
go up and see Mrs. Craven? The old woman's teeth chattered in the cold
little hall. "We are dead, all of us dead here," the skins on the walls
seemed to say; "and you'll be dead soon . . . oh! yes, you will."

Olva went up to Mrs. Craven. The windows of her room were tightly closed
and a great fire was blazing