LITMIR.BIZ

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they're the right sorts?” she cried.

      “They're off the little list I'd made to get when my ship came in.” He bit his lip.

      Fanny was overcome with emotion. She must turn the conversation.

      “They was all on thorns to do it; they all paid their shares, all except the Queen of Sheba.”

      The Queen of Sheba was Clara.

      “And wouldn't she join?” Paul asked.

      “She didn't get the chance; we never told her; we wasn't going to have HER bossing THIS show. We didn't WANT her to join.”

      Paul laughed at the woman. He was much moved. At last he must go. She was very close to him. Suddenly she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him vehemently.

      “I can give you a kiss to-day,” she said apologetically. “You've looked so white, it's made my heart ache.”

      Paul kissed her, and left her. Her arms were so pitifully thin that his heart ached also.

      That day he met Clara as he ran downstairs to wash his hands at dinner-time.

      “You have stayed to dinner!” he exclaimed. It was unusual for her.

      “Yes; and I seem to have dined on old surgical-appliance stock. I MUST go out now, or I shall feel stale india-rubber right through.”

      She lingered. He instantly caught at her wish.

      “You are going anywhere?” he asked.

      They went together up to the Castle. Outdoors she dressed very plainly, down to ugliness; indoors she always looked nice. She walked with hesitating steps alongside Paul, bowing and turning away from him. Dowdy in dress, and drooping, she showed to great disadvantage. He could scarcely recognise her strong form, that seemed to slumber with power. She appeared almost insignificant, drowning her stature in her stoop, as she shrank from the public gaze.

      The Castle grounds were very green and fresh. Climbing the precipitous ascent, he laughed and chattered, but she was silent, seeming to brood over something. There was scarcely time to go inside the squat, square building that crowns the bluff of rock. They leaned upon the wall where the cliff runs sheer down to the Park. Below them, in their holes in the sandstone, pigeons preened themselves and cooed softly. Away down upon the boulevard at the foot of the rock, tiny trees stood in their own pools of shadow, and tiny people went scurrying about in almost ludicrous importance.

      “You feel as if you could scoop up the folk like tadpoles, and have a handful of them,” he said.

      She laughed, answering:

      “Yes; it is not necessary to get far off in order to see us proportionately. The trees are much more significant.”

      “Bulk only,” he said.

      She laughed cynically.

      Away beyond the boulevard the thin stripes of the metals showed upon the railway-track, whose margin was crowded with little stacks of timber, beside which smoking toy engines fussed. Then the silver string of the canal lay at random among the black heaps. Beyond, the dwellings, very dense on the river flat, looked like black, poisonous herbage, in thick rows and crowded beds, stretching right away, broken now and then by taller plants, right to where the river glistened in a hieroglyph across the country. The steep scarp cliffs across the river looked puny. Great stretches of country darkened with trees and faintly brightened with corn-land, spread towards the haze, where the hills rose blue beyond grey.

      “It is comforting,” said Mrs. Dawes, “to think the town goes no farther. It is only a LITTLE sore upon the country yet.”

      “A little scab,” Paul said.

      She shivered. She loathed the town. Looking drearily across at the country which was forbidden her, her impassive face, pale and hostile, she reminded Paul of one of the bitter, remorseful angels.

      “But the town's all right,” he said; “it's only temporary. This is the crude, clumsy make-shift we've practised on, till we find out what the idea is. The town will come all right.”

      The pigeons in the pockets of rock, among the perched bushes, cooed comfortably. To the left the large church of St. Mary rose into space, to keep close company with the Castle, above the heaped rubble of the town. Mrs. Dawes smiled brightly as she looked across the country.

      “I feel better,” she said.

      “Thank you,” he replied. “Great compliment!”

      “Oh, my brother!” she laughed.

      “H'm! that's snatching back with the left hand what you gave with the right, and no mistake,” he said.

      She laughed in amusement at him.

      “But what was the matter with you?” he asked. “I know you were brooding something special. I can see the stamp of it on your face yet.”

      “I think I will not tell you,” she said.

      “All right, hug it,” he answered.

      She flushed and bit her lip.

      “No,” she said, “it was the girls.”

      “What about 'em?” Paul asked.

      “They have been plotting something for a week now, and to-day they seem particularly full of it. All alike; they insult me with their secrecy.”

      “Do they?” he asked in concern.

      “I should not mind,” she went on, in the metallic, angry tone, “if they did not thrust it into my face—the fact that they have a secret.”

      “Just like women,” said he.

      “It is hateful, their mean gloating,” she said intensely.

      Paul was silent. He knew what the girls gloated over. He was sorry to be the cause of this new dissension.

      “They can have all the secrets in the world,” she went on, brooding bitterly; “but they might refrain from glorying in them, and making me feel more out of it than ever. It is—it is almost unbearable.”

      Paul thought for a few minutes. He was much perturbed.

      “I will tell you what it's all about,” he said, pale and nervous. “It's my birthday, and they've bought me a fine lot of paints, all the girls. They're jealous of you”—he felt her stiffen coldly at the word 'jealous'—“merely because I sometimes bring you a book,” he added slowly. “But, you see, it's only a trifle. Don't bother about it, will you—because”—he laughed quickly—“well, what would they say if they saw us here now, in spite of their victory?”

      She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to their present intimacy. It was almost insolent of him. Yet he was so quiet, she forgave him, although it cost her an effort.

      Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall. He had inherited from his mother a fineness of mould, so that his hands were small and vigorous. Hers were large, to match her large limbs, but white and powerful looking. As Paul looked at them he knew her. “She is wanting somebody to take her hands—for all she is so contemptuous of us,” he said to himself. And she saw nothing but his two hands, so warm and alive, which seemed to live for her. He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere—dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.

      “Is that two o'clock striking?” Mrs. Dawes said in surprise.

      Paul started, and everything

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