LITMIR.BIZ

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me!” he said simply.

      Occasionally she would. But she was afraid. When he had her then, there was something in it that made her shrink away from him—something unnatural. She grew to dread him. He was so quiet, yet so strange. She was afraid of the man who was not there with her, whom she could feel behind this make-belief lover; somebody sinister, that filled her with horror. She began to have a kind of horror of him. It was almost as if he were a criminal. He wanted her—he had her—and it made her feel as if death itself had her in its grip. She lay in horror. There was no man there loving her. She almost hated him. Then came little bouts of tenderness. But she dared not pity him.

      Dawes had come to Colonel Seely's Home near Nottingham. There Paul visited him sometimes, Clara very occasionally. Between the two men the friendship developed peculiarly. Dawes, who mended very slowly and seemed very feeble, seemed to leave himself in the hands of Morel.

      In the beginning of November Clara reminded Paul that it was her birthday.

      “I'd nearly forgotten,” he said.

      “I'd thought quite,” she replied.

      “No. Shall we go to the seaside for the week-end?”

      They went. It was cold and rather dismal. She waited for him to be warm and tender with her, instead of which he seemed hardly aware of her. He sat in the railway-carriage, looking out, and was startled when she spoke to him. He was not definitely thinking. Things seemed as if they did not exist. She went across to him.

      “What is it dear?” she asked.

      “Nothing!” he said. “Don't those windmill sails look monotonous?”

      He sat holding her hand. He could not talk nor think. It was a comfort, however, to sit holding her hand. She was dissatisfied and miserable. He was not with her; she was nothing.

      And in the evening they sat among the sandhills, looking at the black, heavy sea.

      “She will never give in,” he said quietly.

      Clara's heart sank.

      “No,” she replied.

      “There are different ways of dying. My father's people are frightened, and have to be hauled out of life into death like cattle into a slaughter-house, pulled by the neck; but my mother's people are pushed from behind, inch by inch. They are stubborn people, and won't die.”

      “Yes,” said Clara.

      “And she won't die. She can't. Mr. Renshaw, the parson, was in the other day. 'Think!' he said to her; 'you will have your mother and father, and your sisters, and your son, in the Other Land.' And she said: 'I have done without them for a long time, and CAN do without them now. It is the living I want, not the dead.' She wants to live even now.”

      “Oh, how horrible!” said Clara, too frightened to speak.

      “And she looks at me, and she wants to stay with me,” he went on monotonously. “She's got such a will, it seems as if she would never go—never!”

      “Don't think of it!” cried Clara.

      “And she was religious—she is religious now—but it is no good. She simply won't give in. And do you know, I said to her on Thursday: 'Mother, if I had to die, I'd die. I'd WILL to die.' And she said to me, sharp: 'Do you think I haven't? Do you think you can die when you like?'”

      His voice ceased. He did not cry, only went on speaking monotonously. Clara wanted to run. She looked round. There was the black, re-echoing shore, the dark sky down on her. She got up terrified. She wanted to be where there was light, where there were other people. She wanted to be away from him. He sat with his head dropped, not moving a muscle.

      “And I don't want her to eat,” he said, “and she knows it. When I ask her: 'Shall you have anything' she's almost afraid to say 'Yes.' 'I'll have a cup of Benger's,' she says. 'It'll only keep your strength up,' I said to her. 'Yes'—and she almost cried—'but there's such a gnawing when I eat nothing, I can't bear it.' So I went and made her the food. It's the cancer that gnaws like that at her. I wish she'd die!”

      “Come!” said Clara roughly. “I'm going.”

      He followed her down the darkness of the sands. He did not come to her. He seemed scarcely aware of her existence. And she was afraid of him, and disliked him.

      In the same acute daze they went back to Nottingham. He was always busy, always doing something, always going from one to the other of his friends.

      On the Monday he went to see Baxter Dawes. Listless and pale, the man rose to greet the other, clinging to his chair as he held out his hand.

      “You shouldn't get up,” said Paul.

      Dawes sat down heavily, eyeing Morel with a sort of suspicion.

      “Don't you waste your time on me,” he said, “if you've owt better to do.”

      “I wanted to come,” said Paul. “Here! I brought you some sweets.”

      The invalid put them aside.

      “It's not been much of a week-end,” said Morel.

      “How's your mother?” asked the other.

      “Hardly any different.”

      “I thought she was perhaps worse, being as you didn't come on Sunday.”

      “I was at Skegness,” said Paul. “I wanted a change.”

      The other looked at him with dark eyes. He seemed to be waiting, not quite daring to ask, trusting to be told.

      “I went with Clara,” said Paul.

      “I knew as much,” said Dawes quietly.

      “It was an old promise,” said Paul.

      “You have it your own way,” said Dawes.

      This was the first time Clara had been definitely mentioned between them.

      “Nay,” said Morel slowly; “she's tired of me.”

      Again Dawes looked at him.

      “Since August she's been getting tired of me,” Morel repeated.

      The two men were very quiet together. Paul suggested a game of draughts. They played in silence.

      “I s'll go abroad when my mother's dead,” said Paul.

      “Abroad!” repeated Dawes.

      “Yes; I don't care what I do.”

      They continued the game. Dawes was winning.

      “I s'll have to begin a new start of some sort,” said Paul; “and you as well, I suppose.”

      He took one of Dawes's pieces.

      “I dunno where,” said the other.

      “Things have to happen,” Morel said. “It's no good doing anything—at least—no, I don't know. Give me some toffee.”

      The two men ate sweets, and began another game of draughts.

      “What made that scar on your mouth?” asked Dawes.

      Paul put his hand hastily to his lips, and looked over the garden.

      “I had a bicycle accident,” he said.

      Dawes's hand trembled as he moved the piece.

      “You shouldn't ha' laughed at me,” he said, very low.

      “When?”

      “That night on Woodborough Road, when you and her passed me—you with your hand on her shoulder.”

      “I never laughed at you,” said Paul.

      Dawes kept his fingers on the draught-piece.

      “I never knew you were there till the very second when you passed,” said Morel.

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