and Dieppe would
cost too much. For the first time he opposed Mildred's wishes, and to
her surprise she found him perfectly firm. There was no quarrel, but
although she was silent he felt that she did not yield her opinion and
was displeased with him.

Late at night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive
imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry,
scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the
"sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage
as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and
do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe
and pen, hoping to find her still awake. But she was already sound
asleep. The room was dark, but he saw her by the illumination of
distant lightning, playing on the edge of a dark and sultry world. His
appointed task was not yet done and he returned to the study, a long,
low, dark-panelled room, looking on the garden. The windows were wide
open on the hushed, warm, almost sulphurous darkness, from which frail
white-winged moths came floating in towards the shaded lamp on his
writing-table. He sat down to his papers and by an effort of will
concentrated his mind upon them. Habit had made such concentration easy
to him as a rule, but to-night, after half an hour of steady work, he
was mastered by an invading restlessness of mind and body. The cause was
not far to seek; he could hear all the time he worked the dull, almost
continuous, roar of distant thunder. All else was very still, it was
long past midnight and the town was asleep.

He got up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished
pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of
nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled
and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long
trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot
as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before
it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its cavernous
chimneys, deep cellars, and enormous unexplored walls, filling it with
strange, whispering sounds, as of half articulate voices, here menacing,
there struggling to reveal some sinister and vital secret. The blast
died away, but it seemed to have left those voices still muttering and
sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such
various lives