houlder hurts. I don't want to talk to you any more. You tried to
trap me into telling a lie. You don't understand anything at all. And
I'll never forgive you."

"Yes, you will," he said to himself again and again through the silence
in which they plashed down the river. But when he was alone in his
cottage, the truth flew at him and grappled him with teeth and claws. He
loved her. She loved, or had loved--or might have loved--or might
love--his brother. He must go: and the next morning he went without a
word. He left a note for Mrs Sheepmarsh, and a cheque in lieu of notice;
and letter and cheque were signed with his name in full.

He went back to the old life, but the taste of it all was gone. Shooting
parties, house parties, the Brydges woman even, prettier than ever, and
surer of all things: how could these charm one whose fancy, whose heart
indeed, wandered for ever in a green garden or by a quiet river with a
young woman who had served in a tobacconist's shop, and who would be
some day his brother's wife?

The days were long, the weeks seemed interminable. And all the time
there was the white house, as it had been; there were mother and
daughter living the same dainty, dignified, charming life to which he
had come so near. Why had he ever gone there? Why had he ever
interfered? He had meant to ensnare her heart just to free his brother
from an adventuress. An adventuress! He groaned aloud.

"Oh, fool! But you are punished!" he said; "she's angry now--angrier
even than that evening on the river, for she knows now that even the
name you gave her to call you by was not the one your own people use.
This comes of trying to act like an ass in a book."

The months went on. The Brydges woman rallied him on his absent air. She
spoke of dairymaids. He wondered how he could ever have found her
amusing, and whether her vulgarity was a growth, or had been merely
hidden.

And all the time Celia and the white house were dragging at his
heart-strings. Enough was left of the fool that he constantly reproached
himself for having been, to make him sure that had he had no brother,
had he met her with no duty to the absent to stand between them she
would have loved him.

Then one day came the South African mail, and it brought a letter from
his brother, the lad who had had the sense to find a jewel behind a
tobacconist's counter, and had trusted it to him.

The letter was long and ineffective. It was the postscript that was