however, enter her house, but strolled onward to the narrow pass
conducting to Red-King Castle and the sea. He was in momentary heaviness
at the thought that they might be Avice with a worthless lover, but a
faintly argumentative tone from the man informed him that they were the
same married couple going homeward whom he had encountered on a previous
occasion.

The next day he gave the servants a half-holiday to get the pretty Avice
into the castle again for a few hours, the better to observe her. While
she was pulling down the blinds at sunset a whistle of peculiar quality
came from some point on the cliffs outside the lawn. He observed that
her colour rose slightly, though she bustled about as if she had noticed
nothing.

Pierston suddenly suspected that she had not only fifteen past admirers
but a current one. Still, he might be mistaken. Stimulated now by
ancient memories and present tenderness to use every effort to make her
his wife, despite her conventional unfitness, he strung himself up to
sift this mystery. If he could only win her--and how could a country
girl refuse such an opportunity?--he could pack her off to school for
two or three years, marry her, enlarge her mind by a little travel, and
take his chance of the rest. As to her want of ardour for him--so sadly
in contrast with her sainted mother's affection--a man twenty years
older than his bride could expect no better, and he would be well
content to put up with it in the pleasure of possessing one in whom
seemed to linger as an aroma all the charm of his youth and his early
home.

2. IX. JUXTAPOSITIONS

It was a sad and leaden afternoon, and Pierston paced up the long, steep
pass or street of the Wells. On either side of the road young girls
stood with pitchers at the fountains which bubbled there, and behind the
houses forming the propylaea of the rock rose the massive forehead of
the Isle--crested at this part with its enormous ramparts as with a
mural crown.

As you approach the upper end of the street all progress seems about to
be checked by the almost vertical face of the escarpment. Into it your
track apparently runs point-blank: a confronting mass which, if it were
to slip down, would overwhelm the whole town. But in a moment you find
that the road, the old Roman highway into the peninsula, turns at a
sharp angle when it reaches the base of the scarp, and ascends in the
stiffest of inclines to the right. To the left there is also