kindly presence of the
old lady of the house.

CHAPTER XV

THE CYNIC AND THE COUNTRYWOMAN

Radford Leicester stayed at the cottage among the Devonshire moors for
several days. A more lonely place could not be well imagined. The
cottage itself stood in a little dell where trees grew, and a moorland
stream babbled. Early spring flowers were to be seen there, and the
smell of the bursting new life of bracken and heather and willow bush
was sweet beyond words; but the view from the cottage was such as one
only finds in a moorland district. For miles nothing was to be seen but
a wild waste of nearly uninhabited land. The few cottages were occupied
by those who had reclaimed strips of waste land, and obtained a scanty
living thereon. A month or two later the whole scene would be aglow with
the bloom of furze and heather; but now it was grim and grey and, under
a cloudy sky, forbidding. But Leicester was not sorry for this. The
countryside, the loneliness, fitted in with his mood. He felt that the
past was destroyed, and that the things which were once possible to him
had come to an end. What had the future for him? What was he to do? That
was the question he had to face.

Immediately after he had realised that Olive Castlemaine was lost to him
for ever, he had conceived wild schemes of revenge. He wanted to make
Olive suffer as he had suffered; he swore that he would humble her pride
to the dust, and that he would win the wager which for the present had
lost him the woman he had loved. But that was all over now. He had
become degraded in the eyes of the nation. He had no respect for the
morality of the political world; but however low it might be, there was
a kind of moral standard which people demanded in their representatives.
They were not troubled because he had drunk too much, it was that he had
become intoxicated at the wrong time. He had actually appeared on a
public platform in a state of drunken imbecility. He had given the
opponents of his party the whip hand, and he had in all probability lost
his party the election. That was his sin, and it would take years for
them to forget it.

Besides, he was not the kind of man to go back and plead forgiveness.
His pride forbade him. What? He, Radford Leicester, who had laughed at
these clodhoppers, go back cap in hand, and plead with them to take him
back! But what could he do? What had the future for him? That was the
question he had to face. Hope gone, faith