ct of her
aunt's death and funeral. He began telling her of his day's doings,
and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he
had not seen for years, had called upon him. While ascending to the
town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly
and with an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white road and
its bordering bushes of hazel:

"Richard--I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while. I don't know
whether you think it wrong?"

He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said
vaguely, "Oh, did you? What did you do that for?"

"I don't know. He wanted to, and I let him."

"I hope it pleased him. I should think it was hardly a novelty."

They lapsed into silence. Had this been a case in the court of an
omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes the curious fact
that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not
said a word about the kiss.

After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers.
She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition,
and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When
Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the
attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o'clock. Entering
their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty
miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went
to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with
hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered
the far-reaching scene. He was musing, "I think," he said at last,
without turning his head, "that I must get the committee to change
the school-stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."

There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:

"And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the
class-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives
me the ear-ache."

As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round.
The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls
upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the
massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast
to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch
furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod
to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.

"Soo!" he said (this being the w