sense of
something unfamiliar, but of course not seeing who he was. Presently
he found his way again into the Rectory garden, avoiding the prickles
of the tree against which he had spiked himself on his way out. Mrs.
Wilberforce was on her way upstairs with her candle as he came in. She
looked at him disapprovingly, and hoped, with something like irony, that
he had enjoyed his walk. "Though you must have had to grope along in the
dark, which does not seem much of a pleasure."

"The air is delightful," said Dick, with unnecessary fervour. "I like a
stroll in the dark, and the lights in the cottages are pretty to see."

"Dear me, I should have thought everybody was in bed; but late hours
are creeping in with other things," said the rector's wife as she went
upstairs. The rector himself was standing at the door of his study, with
an unlighted pipe in his hand. "Come and have a smoke," he said. For a
moment it occurred to Cavendish, though rather as a temptation than as a
relief, to tell the story which seemed to fill his mind like something
palpable, leaving room for nothing else, to his simple-minded rural
friend, an older man than himself and a clergyman, and therefore likely
to have received other confidences before now. But something sealed
his lips; the very atmosphere of the house, the narrow life with its
thousand little occupations, in which there was an ideal yet prosaic
innocence, an incapacity even to understand those elements of which
tragedy is made. How could he say it--how reveal anything so alien to
every possibility! He might have told the good Wilberforce had he been
in debt or in love, or any light difficulty in which the parson might
have played the part of mediator, whether with an angry father or an
irritated creditor. He would have made an excellent confidant in such
cases, but not in this.

In debt or in love--in love! Dick Cavendish's character was well known;
or so, at least, everybody thought. He was always in love, just as he
was always in good spirits,--a fellow full of frolic and fun, only too
light-hearted to take life with sufficient seriousness; and life must be
taken seriously if you are going to make anything of it. This had been
said to him a great many times since he came home. There was no harm
known of him, as there generally is of a young man who lets a few years
drop in the heyday of life. He liked his fun, the servants said, which
was their way of putting it: and his parents cons