augh at me or let anybody else know?'

'Never.'

'Then I will tell you,' she said quite seriously. ''Tis because I get
tired o' my lovers as soon as I get to know them well. What I see in one
young man for a while soon leaves him and goes into another yonder,
and I follow, and then what I admire fades out of him and springs up
somewhere else; and so I follow on, and never fix to one. I have
loved FIFTEEN a'ready! Yes, fifteen, I am almost ashamed to say,' she
repeated, laughing. 'I can't help it, sir, I assure you. Of course it
is really, to ME, the same one all through, on'y I can't catch him!' She
added anxiously, 'You won't tell anybody o' this in me, will you, sir?
Because if it were known I am afraid no man would like me.'

Pierston was surprised into stillness. Here was this obscure and almost
illiterate girl engaged in the pursuit of the impossible ideal, just as
he had been himself doing for the last twenty years. She was doing it
quite involuntarily, by sheer necessity of her organization, puzzled all
the while at her own instinct. He suddenly thought of its bearing upon
himself, and said, with a sinking heart--

'Am I--one of them?'

She pondered critically.

'You was; for a week; when I first saw you.'

'Only a week?'

'About that.'

'What made the being of your fancy forsake my form and go elsewhere?'

'Well--though you seemed handsome and gentlemanly at first--'

'Yes?'

'I found you too old soon after.'

'You are a candid young person.'

'But you asked me, sir!' she expostulated.

'I did; and, having been answered, I won't intrude upon you longer. So
cut along home as fast as you can. It is getting late.'

When she had passed out of earshot he also followed homewards. This
seeking of the Well-Beloved was, then, of the nature of a knife which
could cut two ways. To be the seeker was one thing: to be one of the
corpses from which the ideal inhabitant had departed was another; and
this was what he had become now, in the mockery of new Days.

The startling parallel in the idiosyncracies of Avice and
himself--evinced by the elusiveness of the Beloved with her as with
him--meant probably that there had been some remote ancestor common
to both families, from whom the trait had latently descended and
recrudesced. But the result was none the less disconcerting.

Drawing near his own gate he smelt tobacco, and could discern two
figures in the side lane leading past Avice's door. They did not,