rly: "Oh, why
aren't we an ordinary family? Why can't we cry for a father who leaves
us nearly a hundred pounds?"

"Try to," Rupert advised. He was smiling queerly to himself.

"Helen, isn't it horrid?"

"No: I don't like crying."

"John, you look as though you're going to refuse the money. I will if
you do. John--"

"Don't be a little fool," he said. "Refuse it! I'm holding on to it with
both hands."

She drooped forlornly, but no one seemed to notice her. Daniel was
absorbed in the Greek grammar, and the others were thinking their own
thoughts.

"I'll go on to the moor," she told herself, and she slipped through the
window in search of what adventure she could find. Outside the garden
she paused and nodded towards the house.

"I don't care," she said. "It's all their fault. And Helen--oh, I could
kill Helen!" Wickedly she tried to mimic Helen's face.

A few minutes later John followed through the window, and he went into
the darkness with a strange excitement. For a time he did not think, for
he was experiencing all the relief of daring to feel freely, and the
effect was at first only a lightening of the heart and feet. Hardly
knowing where he wandered, he found himself on the moor behind Brent
Farm, and there, in the heather, he sat down to light his pipe. He was
puzzled when the match quivered in his hand, and then he became aware
that innumerable pulses were beating in his body, and with that
realization others rushed on him, and he knew how he had held himself in
check for months, and how he desired the touch of Lily Brent's splendid
strength and the sight of her drowsy, threatening eyes. Picturing her,
he could not rest, and he rose and marched aimlessly to and fro. He had
been a fool, he told himself: he had denied his youth and doubted her:
proud in poverty, he should have gone to her and offered all he had, the
love and labour of his body and brain, honouring her in asking her to
take him empty-handed if she would take him at all. Now he must go to
her as though she could be bought at the price of a hundred pounds a
years and the poor thing he had once called his pride, known now for a
mere notion gathered from some source outside himself. He who had
scorned convention had been its easy victim, and he bit hard at his pipe
stem and grunted in disgust.

"We get half our ideas out of books," he said. "No woman would have been
such a fool. They get things at first hand."

He stopped and pointed at t