learn from such
lessons as these. Her suffering was more direct. Three men had wronged
her; therefore she hated them, and, if she could, would do them harm.

"These negotiations are quite useless," she told Herbert when she
came downstairs. "We had much better bide our time. Tell me just about
Stephen Wonham, though."

He drew her into the study again. "Wonham is or was in Scotland,
learning to farm with connections of the Ansells: I believe the money
is to go towards setting him up. Apparently he is a hard worker. He also
drinks!"

She nodded and smiled. "More than he did?"

"My informant, Mr. Tilliard--oh, I ought not to have mentioned his name.
He is one of the better sort of Rickie's Cambridge friends, and has been
dreadfully grieved at the collapse, but he does not want to be mixed up
in it. This autumn he was up in the Lowlands, close by, and very kindly
made a few unobtrusive inquiries for me. The man is becoming an habitual
drunkard."

She smiled again. Stephen had evoked her secret, and she hated him
more for that than for anything else that he had done. The poise of his
shoulders that morning--it was no more--had recalled Gerald.

If only she had not been so tired! He had reminded her of the greatest
thing she had known, and to her cloudy mind this seemed degradation. She
had turned to him as to her lover; with a look, which a man of his type
understood, she had asked for his pity; for one terrible moment she
had desired to be held in his arms. Even Herbert was surprised when she
said, "I'm glad he drinks. I hope he'll kill himself. A man like that
ought never to have been born."

"Perhaps the sins of the parents are visited on the children," said
Herbert, taking her to the carriage. "Yet it is not for us to decide."

"I feel sure he will be punished. What right has he--" She broke off.
What right had he to our common humanity? It was a hard lesson for
any one to learn. For Agnes it was impossible. Stephen was illicit,
abnormal, worse than a man diseased. Yet she had turned to him: he had
drawn out the truth.

"My dear, don't cry," said her brother, drawing up the windows. "I have
great hopes of Mr. Tilliard--the Silts have written--Mrs. Failing will
do what she can--"

As she drove to the cemetery, her bitterness turned against Ansell, who
had kept her husband alive in the days after Stephen's expulsion. If
he had not been there, Rickie would have renounced his mother and his
brother and all the