!--Matriarchy! ... Does SHE say all this too?"

"Oh no. She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this--all in the
last twelve hours!"

"It will upset all received opinion hereabout. Good God--what will
Shaston say!"

"I don't say that it won't. I don't know--I don't know! ... As I
say, I am only a feeler, not a reasoner."

"Now," said Gillingham, "let us take it quietly, and have something
to drink over it." He went under the stairs, and produced a bottle
of cider-wine, of which they drank a rummer each. "I think you are
rafted, and not yourself," he continued. "Do go back and make up
your mind to put up with a few whims. But keep her. I hear on all
sides that she's a charming young thing."

"Ah yes! That's the bitterness of it! Well, I won't stay. I have a
long walk before me."

Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and at parting
expressed his hope that this consultation, singular as its subject
was, would be the renewal of their old comradeship. "Stick to her!"
were his last words, flung into the darkness after Phillotson; from
which his friend answered "Aye, aye!"

But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds of night, and no
sound was audible but that of the purling tributaries of the Stour,
he said, "So Gillingham, my friend, you had no stronger arguments
against it than those!"

"I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses--that's
what I think!" murmured Gillingham, as he walked back alone.

The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson told Sue:

"You may go--with whom you will. I absolutely and unconditionally
agree."

Having once come to this conclusion it seemed to Phillotson more
and more indubitably the true one. His mild serenity at the sense
that he was doing his duty by a woman who was at his mercy almost
overpowered his grief at relinquishing her.

Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal together had
come--a cloudy evening with wind--which indeed was very seldom absent
in this elevated place. How permanently it was imprinted upon his
vision; that look of her as she glided into the parlour to tea;
a slim flexible figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and
marked by the pallors of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic
possibilities quite at variance with her times of buoyancy; a trying
of this morsel and that, and an inability to eat either. Her nervous
manner, begotten of a fear lest he should be injured by he