d,
where even in midsummer the mud oozed up at the lightest footfall, pools
and sedgy places, the home and sometimes the breeding place of the
melancholy snipe. Of colour there was singularly little. The heather
bushes were stunted, their roots blackened as though with fire, and even
the yellow of the gorse shone with a dimmer lustre. But in the
distance, a flaming carpet of orange and purple stretched almost to the
summit of the brown hills of kindlier soil, and farther round,
westwards, richly cultivated fields, from which the labourers seemed to
hang like insects in the air, rolled away almost to the clouds.

Tallente looked at them a little wearily, impressed with the allegorical
significance of his position. It seemed to him that he was in the land
to which he belonged, the barren land of desolation and failure. The
triumphs of the past failed for a moment to thrill his pulses. The
memory of his well-lived and successful life brought him not an atom of
consolation. The present was all that mattered, and the present had
brought him to the gates of failure.--After all, what did a man work
for, he wondered? What was the end and aim of it all? Life at
Martinhoe Manor, with a faithful but terrified manservant, bookshelves
ready to afford him the phantasmal satisfaction of another man's
thoughts, sea and winds, beauties of landscape and colour, to bring him
to the threshold of an epicurean pleasure which needed yet that one
pulsating link with humanity to yield the full meed of joy and content.
It all came back to the old story of man's weakness, he thought, as he
rose to his feet, his teeth almost savagely clenching his pipe. He had
become a conqueror of circumstances only to become a victim of the
primitive needs of life.

At about a quarter of a mile from the house, the road branched away to
the left to disappear suddenly over the edge of a drop of many hundreds
of feet. Tallente passed through a plain white gate, down an avenue of
dwarfed oaks, to emerge into an unexpectedly green meadow, cloven
through the middle with a straight white avenue. Through another gate
he passed into a drive which led through flaming banks of rhododendrons,
now a little past their full glory, to the front of the house, a long
and amplified building which, by reason of many additions, had become an
abode of some pretensions. A manservant answered his ring at once and
led him into a cool, white stone hall, the walls of which were hung from