ern her. His ebbing spirit was
revived by the shock of an ardour like his own. She had not shrunk from
calling him a coward--and it did him good to hear her call him so! Her
words put life back into its true perspective, restored their meaning to
obsolete terms: to truth and manliness and courage. He had lived so long
among equivocations that he had forgotten how to look a fact in the
face; but here was a woman who judged life by his own standards--and by
those standards she had found him wanting!

Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion
as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as
strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation--the right to
begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see
that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one
of trying to evade its results.

"You are right--I will go back," he said.

She thanked him with her eyes, as she had thanked him on the terrace at
Lynbrook, on the autumn evening which had witnessed their first broken
exchange of confidences; and he was struck once more with the change
that feeling produced in her. Emotions flashed across her face like the
sweep of sun-rent clouds over a quiet landscape, bringing out the gleam
of hidden waters, the fervour of smouldering colours, all the subtle
delicacies of modelling that are lost under the light of an open sky.
And it was extraordinary how she could infuse into a principle the
warmth and colour of a passion! If conduct, to most people, seemed a
cold matter of social prudence or inherited habit, to her it was always
the newly-discovered question of her own relation to life--as most women
see the great issues only through their own wants and prejudices, so she
seemed always to see her personal desires in the light of the larger
claims.

"But I don't think," Amherst went on, "that anything can be said to
convince me that I ought to alter my decision. These months of idleness
have shown me that I'm one of the members of society who are a danger to
the community if their noses are not kept to the grindstone----"

Justine lowered her eyes musingly, and he saw she was undergoing the
reaction of constraint which always followed on her bursts of
unpremeditated frankness.

"That is not for me to judge," she answered after a moment. "But if you
decide to go away for a time--surely it ought to be in such a way that
your going does n