lt exposed, indecent, and
she hated him, all the more because mixed with her hatred was a kind of
disapproving envy, a resentment that he should be free to remember
where she was bound to forget....

He saw her hand clench slowly at her side, and for the first time became
aware of her state of mind.

"Good-bye, Jo," he said kindly--"I'll tell Father Palmer to write to
you."

"Thanks, but I don't promise to take him," was her ungracious fling.

"No--why should you? And of course he may have already made his plans.
Good-bye, and thank you for your great kindness in offering the living
to me--it was very noble of you, considering what your family has
suffered from mine."

He had carefully avoided all reference to his father, but he now
realized that he had kept the wrong silence. It was the man who had
brought her happiness, not the man who had brought her shame, that she
was unable to speak of.

"Oh, don't you think of that--it wasn't your doing"--she melted towards
him now she had a genuine cause for indignation--"and we've come through
it better than we hoped, and some of us deserved."

Lawrence gave her an odd smile, which made his face with its innumerable
lines and pouches look rather like a gargoyle's. Then he walked off
bare-headed into the twilight.

Sec.5

Ellen was intensely relieved when she heard that he had refused the
living, and a little indignant with Joanna for having offered it to him.

"You don't seem to realize how very awkward it would have been for me--I
don't want to have anything more to do with that family."

"I daresay not," said Joanna grimly, "but that ain't no reason why this
parish shouldn't have a good parson. Lawrence ud have made the people
properly mind their ways. And it ain't becoming in you, Ellen Alce, to
let your own misdoings stand between folk and what's good for 'em."

Ellen accepted the rebuke good-humouredly. She had grown more mellow of
late, and was settling into her life at Ansdore as she had never settled
since she went to school. She relished her widowed state, for it
involved the delectable business of looking about for a second husband.
She was resolved to act with great deliberation. This time there should
be no hustling into matrimony. It seemed to her now as if that
precipitate taking of Arthur Alce had been at the bottom of all her
troubles; she had been only a poor little schoolgirl, a raw contriver,
hurling herself out of the frying-pan of Ansdo