ight. How you will scorn
yourself! Surely there was never a man who united such capacity for
great things with so mean an ideal. You will never win even the paltry
satisfaction on which you have set your mind--never! But you can't be
made to understand that. You will throw away all the best part of your
life. Meet me in a few years, and tell me the story of the interval.'

'I will engage to do that, Marcella.'

'You will? But not to tell me the truth. You will not dare to tell the
truth.'

'Why not?' he asked, indifferently. 'Decidedly I shall owe it you in
return for your frankness to-day. Till then--good-bye.'

She did not refuse her hand, and as he moved away she watched him with
a smile of slighting good-nature.

On the morrow Godwin was back in Bristol, and there he dwelt for
another six months, a period of mental and physical lassitude. Earwaker
corresponded with him, and urged him to attempt the work that had been
proposed, but such effort was beyond his power.

He saw one day in a literary paper an announcement that Reusch's _Bibel
und Natur_ was about to be published in an English translation. So
someone else had successfully finished the work he undertook nearly two
years ago. He amused himself with the thought that he could ever have
persevered so long in such profitless labour, and with a contemptuous
laugh he muttered '_Thohu wabohu_.'

Just when the winter had set in, he received an offer of a post in
chemical works at St. Helen's, and without delay travelled northwards.
The appointment was a poor one, and seemed unlikely to be a step to
anything better, but his resources would not last more than another
half year, and employment of whatever kind came as welcome relief to
the tedium of his existence. Established in his new abode, he at length
wrote to Sidwell. She answered him at once in a short letter which he
might have shown to anyone, so calm were its expressions of interest,
so uncompromising its words of congratulation. It began 'Dear Mr.
Peak', and ended with 'Yours sincerely'. Well, he had used the same
formalities, and had uttered his feelings with scarcely more of warmth.
Disappointment troubled him for a moment, and for a moment only. He was
so far from Exeter, and further still from the life that he had led
there. It seemed to him all but certain that Sidwell wrote coldly, with
the intention of discouraging his hopes. What hope was he so foolish as
to entertain? His position poorer than