s Christian name for the first time publicly, and aware
of it herself and of its effect on Vassie through all her real pity.
Ishmael came running, and, taking the little beast tenderly, offered to
knock it on the head with a stone before it knew what was happening; but
Blanche forbade him. She took it back, her fingers slipping in between
it and his palm, and stood bending over it.

"Poor little thing!" she said; "at least it's not bleeding now, and I
believe it may live. It doesn't seem to be suffering, so let's give it
its chance. Put it over the wall onto the grass, Ishmael."

He vaulted over and, taking the toad from her, laid it down on the dewy
grass. It sat trembling for a few moments, and then began to hop away
and was lost in the tall blades that met above its mutilated head--one
of the many tragedies of harvest.

Dusk had fallen while the toad's fate hung in the balance; a pastel dusk
that, even as the girls still stood watching, was made tremulous by the
first faint breath of the moon. From the sea came the red glare of the
Wolf and the cold pure beam of the Bishop; in the north Charles' Wain
gave the first twinkle of its lights; while from the roads came the
creak of the terrestrial waggons beginning to lumber slowly home. It was
time for supper, for lamps, for that meeting within walls which enforces
a sudden intimacy after a day spent in the open, for beginning real
life, as it would have to be lived, once more. The three men stayed
behind to gather the remnants of the picnic, but the girls lifted their
pale skirts about them and were gone over the high stone stile like
moths.

CHAPTER XIII

THE STILE

That evening as supper was being eaten in the new dining-room at
Cloom--a merry supper enough, for all Annie's skeleton presence at one
end of the table--Archelaus walked in. It was the first time he had been
over to Cloom since the night of the bush-beating, and it was the first
time Ishmael had seen him since that glimpse in the light of a lantern
in the wood.

Ishmael looked at his brother, and all that affair seemed very long ago,
in a life when he had not been to London, mixed with men, or met
Blanche. He held out a hand to Archelaus, who for a stupid moment stood
staring at it; then he saw the stranger girl from London, Ishmael's
girl, of whom he had heard, watching him. Beyond her sat Phoebe. Some
train of thought was lit in Archelaus's mind, and burned there; the
second of hesitation