, the
balance of half an hour or so that remained to me appeared far too short.
I remember that as I walked through the wood, I persuaded myself that I
wanted to see Arthur Banks, who, according to my neat and convincing
theory, had taken up his work again and was, therefore, probably at the
Hall. But, as I have said, our impulses are never guided, and seldom
altered, by that form of reasoning known as logic.

* * * * *

But I never reached the farm, and I forgot all about the pretended motive
of my excursion. For in two seconds I came to an entirely new judgment on
the whole problem of the Jervaise-Banks intrigue, a judgment that had
nothing in common with any earlier turns of sympathy from one party to the
other.

Such a little thing it was that temporarily turned me into a disgusted
misanthrope, nothing more than a sight of two people seen for a moment in
an arresting shock of outraged amazement before I turned a disgusted back
upon them and retreated moodily to the Hall. But the sight was enough to
throw the affair into a new perspective, and beget in me a sense of
contempt for all the actors in that midsummer comedy. "A plague on both
your houses," I muttered to myself, but I saw them no longer as the
antagonists of a romantic drama. I was suddenly influenced to a mood of
scorn. Jervaises and Banks alike seemed to me unworthy of any admiration.
The members of those families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures
with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs
upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed
madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was
an infatuated fool, and the best I could hope for him was that he would
realise the fact before it was too late. Frank, confound and confound him,
was a coarse-minded sensualist. The thought of him drove me crazy with
impatience....

And what on earth could have tempted Anne to let him kiss her, if she had
not been a crafty, worldly-minded schemer with an eye on the glories of
ruling at the Hall?

It is true that I did not actually see him kiss her. I turned away too
quickly. But the grouping left me in no doubt that if he had not kissed
her already, he was on the point of doing it. In any case he had had his
arm round her, and she had shown no signs of resisting him.

VIII

THE OUTCAST

My first impression of the curious change in dem