spiritual
seed in forms of heightened loveliness, the bluer beam of the eye, the
richer curve of the lip, all the physical currents of life quickening
under the breath of a kindled thought. It did not occur to him that any
other emotion had effected the change he perceived. Bessy Westmore had
in full measure that gift of unconscious hypocrisy which enables a woman
to make the man in whom she is interested believe that she enters into
all his thoughts. She had--more than this--the gift of self-deception,
supreme happiness of the unreflecting nature, whereby she was able to
believe herself solely engrossed in the subjects they discussed, to
regard him as the mere spokesman of important ideas, thus saving their
intercourse from present constraint, and from the awkward contemplation
of future contingencies. So, in obedience to the ancient sorcery of
life, these two groped for and found each other in regions seemingly so
remote from the accredited domain of romance that it would have been as
a great surprise to them to learn whither they had strayed as to see
the arid streets of Westmore suddenly bursting into leaf.

With Mrs. Westmore's departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware
of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and
purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under
which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost
longed for some collision which would release the manager's pent-up
resentment; yet he dreaded increasingly any accident that might make his
stay at Westmore impossible.

It was on Sundays, when he was freed from his weekly task, that he was
most at the mercy of these opposing feelings. They drove him forth on
long solitary walks beyond the town, walks ending most often in the
deserted grounds of Hopewood, beautiful now in the ruined gold of
October. As he sat under the beech-limbs above the river, watching its
brown current sweep the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this
same current, within its next short reach, passed from wooded seclusion
to the noise and pollution of the mills. So his own life seemed to have
passed once more from the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old
channel of unillumined labour. But other thoughts came to him too: the
vision of converting that melancholy pleasure-ground into an outlet for
the cramped lives of the mill-workers; and he pictured the weed-grown
lawns and paths thronged with holi