The old man read this note twice; then he locked it in his desk, and went slowly and silently out of the room, up the echoing stair.

There was yet more than three weeks to the day of the meeting. Christmas with its train of sad memories, of sadder realities, had to come and go. Abel Kirke and his daughter were quite alone in the old Hall now. Milly had gone. Not only her wages but her food had become matter of consideration. Poverty was beginning to press heavily. Christmas, the traditional time of mirth, intensifies most kinds of misery. Jenny was growing used to misery. She had ceased to rebel, even in thought; but the sights and sounds from which there was no escape lent new pangs to many an old heartache. There was sadness in the quavering voice of the

old man who sang the Christmas Carol; the carts laden with holly loomed against the sky darkly and drearily as they went up the hill; the chime of the Church bells floating through the valley on Christmas. morning found a discordant echo in the uplands beyond Cleveden.

Jenny remained indoors as much as possible till after New Year's Day. Then she felt a little sense of relief; a little longing to breathe freer air, to escape from the oppressive blankness and silence that was her life. She stood a minute at the gate. Which way should she turn? She wanted to be alone, and the loneliest road was up the hill, but she did not go that way.

She remembered the chilly dismal day afterward; the children playing in the mud as she went through the village, the pools of

brown water in the road that led to Stone

brig. She felt weak and confused. Was she going to be ill? she wondered, as she sauntered listlessly by the bare hedgerows. Then she turned to the left and crossed a bridge that led to a road with many turns in it, and hills and valleys, and brown overhanging trees. She would not go far, she said to herself, only to where the road branched off to Hainton-on-the-Hill.

She never knew how it all happened. The hedges were high where the three roads met; there was a sound of footsteps, of a low musical voice; then two absorbed figures gliding under the trees; Fred Stanier's hand laid lightly within Miss Kabury's arm.

Nothing more than this. They did not start, nor modify in any way the confiding attitude; betraying more perhaps by this in

souciance than by the attitude itself. They bowed, passed on, smiled to each other in passing, leaving Jenny standing quite still in the middle of the road, not knowing that she stood. She had turned very pale, she was twining her small brown hands tightly one over the other, trying to persuade herself that she had been the dupe of her own imagination, that what she had seen had no meaning, that signs were not significant.

Then, creeping to the side of the road, she sank down by the bare gnarled roots of an old oak. Two gaunt boughs were stretched out above her, the dead weeds quivered in the hedgerow, the leaden clouds swept slowly over the hill top.

Crouching down, burying her face in her hands, sobbing aloud with a tearless sob; and none to see, none to hear, none to answer.

66

Fred, Fred is it possible?" she cried, with a quiet complaining cry. "Is it possible?

If

you only knew how I loved you,—how I love you still,-in spite of all, how I love you still! If you knew that I have nothing to forgive, nothing to forget, nothing in me sitting here now but love! If only you knew, if only you could believe, if only you could understand!"

The chill wind blew more chilly, whirling the dead leaves down the hill, tossing the gaunt brown arms to and fro against the sky, whispering sadly over the fields and among the leafless trees.

Then she crept wearily down the road again; shivering piteously, cold all through, save over her eyes. There were no tears to fall. Now and then a sob broke from her, a wild cry, a plea for pity, for compassion. If