and round the corner, and was halfway up the
straggling street before he discerned her little figure behind him.

He hastened past the lads and young women with clinking buckets who were
drawing water from the fountains by the wayside, and took the direction
of the church. With the disappearance of the sun the lighthouse had
again set up its flame against the sky, the dark church rising in the
foreground. Here he allowed her to overtake him.

'You loved your mother much?' said Jocelyn.

'I did, sir; of course I did,' said the girl, who tripped so lightly
that it seemed he might have carried her on his hand.

Pierston wished to say, 'So did I,' but did not like to disclose events
which she, apparently, never guessed. Avice fell into thought, and
continued--

'Mother had a very sad life for some time when she was about as old as
I. I should not like mine to be as hers. Her young man proved false to
her because she wouldn't agree to meet him one night, and it grieved
mother almost all her life. I wouldn't ha' fretted about him, if I'd
been she. She would never name his name, but I know he was a wicked,
cruel man; and I hate to think of him.'

After this he could not go into the churchyard with her, and walked
onward alone to the south of the isle. He was wretched for hours. Yet he
would not have stood where he did stand in the ranks of an imaginative
profession if he had not been at the mercy of every haunting of the
fancy that can beset man. It was in his weaknesses as a citizen and
a national-unit that his strength lay as an artist, and he felt it
childish to complain of susceptibilities not only innate but cultivated.

But he was paying dearly enough for his Liliths. He saw a terrible
vengeance ahead. What had he done to be tormented like this? The
Beloved, after flitting from Nichola Pine-Avon to the phantom of a dead
woman whom he never adored in her lifetime, had taken up her abode in
the living representative of the dead, with a permanence of hold which
the absolute indifference of that little brown-eyed representative only
seemed to intensify.

Did he really wish to proceed to marriage with this chit of a girl? He
did: the wish had come at last. It was true that as he studied her
he saw defects in addition to her social insufficiencies. Judgment,
hoodwinked as it was, told him that she was colder in nature, commoner
in character, than that well read, bright little woman Avice the First.
But twenty years ma