his intervention of something
within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were
apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and
sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then--since
his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good
stead--that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these
rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking
from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was
constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?

To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face
reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: "A thousand
pardons; I know I'm not always in the key."

"The key?"

"I haven't yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for
my lack of opportunity."

The retort on Justine's lips dropped to silence, as though his words
had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be
that he was right--that her shrinking from him was the result of an
increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have
despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work
at St. Elizabeth's some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had
seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet
controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself
there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him,
and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her
liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened
gleam of mockery: "Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why
I should see you tomorrow."

"You mean me to take it now?" he exclaimed.

"I don't mean you to take it at all till it's given--above all not to
take it for granted!"

His jutting brows drew together again. "Ah, I can't split hairs with
you. Won't you put me out of my misery?"

She smiled, but not unkindly. "Do you want an anaesthetic?"

"No--a clean cut with the knife!"

"You forget that we're not allowed to despatch hopeless cases--more's
the pity!"

He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. "Hopeless cases? That's it,
then--that's my answer?"

They had reached the point where, at the farther edge of the straggling
settlement, the tiled roof of the railway-station fronted the
post-office cupola; and the shriek of a wh