e gripped me at
the throat like the spring of a beast. Pearls for bread, and that to
Sally--to my wife, whom I loved! The melancholy landscape at which I
looked appeared to divide and dissolve, and she came back to me, not as
I had last seen her, weighed down by the furs which were too heavy, but
in her blue gingham apron with the jagged burn on her wrist, and the
patient, divine smile hovering about her lips. If she went from me now,
it would be always the Sally of that year of poverty, of suffering, that
I had lost. In the future she would haunt me, not in her sea-green gown,
with the jewels on her bosom, but in her gingham apron with the sleeves
rolled back from her reddened arms and the jagged scar from the burn
disfiguring her flesh.

"I'll see him in hell, before I'll vote for him!" called out a voice at
my back, in a rage.

The train pulled into the little wayside station of Riverview, and
getting out, I started on the walk of two miles through the flat, brown
fields to the house. The road was heavy with mud, and it was like
ploughing to keep straight on in the single red-clay furrow which the
wheels of passing wagons had left. All was desolate, all was deserted,
and the only living things I saw between the station and the house were
a few lonely sheep browsing beside a stream, and the brown-winged birds
that flew, with wet plumage, across the road.

When I reached the ruined gateway of Riverview, the old estate of the
Blands', I quickened my pace, and went rapidly up the long drive to the
front of the house, where I saw the glimmer of red firelight on the
ivied window-panes in the west wing. As I ascended the steps, there was
a sound on the gravel, and George Bolingbroke came around the corner of
the house, in hunting clothes, with a setter dog at his heels.

"Hello, Ben!" he remarked, half angrily. "So you've turned up, have you?
Has there been another panic in the market?"

"Is Sally here?" I asked. "I'm anxious about her."

"Well, it's time you were," he answered. "Yes, she's inside."

He stopped in the centre of the walk, and turning from the door, I came
back and faced him in a silence that seemed alive with the beating of
innumerable wings in the air.

"Something's wrong, George," I said at last, breaking through my
restraint.

He looked at me with a calm, enquiring gaze while I was speaking, and by
that look I understood, in an inspiration, he had condemned me.

"Yes, something's wrong," he an