m them she found his resting on her with
the same steady tranquil gaze that had reassured and strengthened
her when they had faced each other in old Mrs. Hobart's kitchen. As
everything else in her consciousness grew more and more confused
and immaterial, became more and more like the universal shimmer that
dissolves the world to failing eyes, Mr. Royall's presence began to
detach itself with rocky firmness from this elusive background. She had
always thought of him--when she thought of him at all--as of someone
hateful and obstructive, but whom she could outwit and dominate when
she chose to make the effort. Only once, on the day of the Old Home Week
celebration, while the stray fragments of his address drifted across
her troubled mind, had she caught a glimpse of another being, a being so
different from the dull-witted enemy with whom she had supposed herself
to be living that even through the burning mist of her own dreams he
had stood out with startling distinctness. For a moment, then, what he
said--and something in his way of saying it--had made her see why he had
always struck her as such a lonely man. But the mist of her dreams had
hidden him again, and she had forgotten that fugitive impression.

It came back to her now, as they sat at the table, and gave her, through
her own immeasurable desolation, a sudden sense of their nearness to
each other. But all these feelings were only brief streaks of light in
the grey blur of her physical weakness. Through it she was aware that
Mr. Royall presently left her sitting by the table in the warm room, and
came back after an interval with a carriage from the station--a closed
"hack" with sun-burnt blue silk blinds--in which they drove together
to a house covered with creepers and standing next to a church with a
carpet of turf before it. They got out at this house, and the carriage
waited while they walked up the path and entered a wainscoted hall and
then a room full of books. In this room a clergyman whom Charity had
never seen received them pleasantly, and asked them to be seated for a
few minutes while witnesses were being summoned.

Charity sat down obediently, and Mr. Royall, his hands behind his back,
paced slowly up and down the room. As he turned and faced Charity, she
noticed that his lips were twitching a little; but the look in his eyes
was grave and calm. Once he paused before her and said timidly: "Your
hair's got kinder loose with the wind," and she lifted