ONE WOMAN:

Being the Second Part
of a Romance of Sussex

BY

ALFRED OLLIVANT

Après a'voir souffert il faut souffrir encore

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40, MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1

First published in 1921

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
DANNY
OWD BOB
BOY WOODBURN
THE GENTLEMAN
THE ROYAL ROAD
THE BROWN MARE
THE NEXT STEP
THE TAMING OF JOHN BLUNT
TWO MEN

TO
MY COUNTRY

CONTENTS

THE CARRIER'S CART

PART I

DEEPENING DUSK

I [THE HOSTEL]
II [COW GAP]
III [THE WATCHMAN ON THE HEAD]
IV [ALF]
V [THE CREEPING DEATH]
VI [THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET]
VII [THE MAN FROM THE NORTH]
VIII [THE CHERUB]
IX [THE SHADOW OF ROYAL]
X [BOBS]
XI [THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN]
XII [RUTH WAKES]
XIII [NIGHTMARE]
XIV [SHADOWS]
XV [THE LANDLORD]
XVI [THE GRANDMOTHER]
XVII [THE CHALLENGE]
XVIII [A SKIRMISH]
XIX [PITCHED BATTLE]
XX [THE VANQUISHED]
XXI [THUNDER]

PART II

TROUBLED DAWN

XXII [THE BETRAYAL]
XXIII [THE COLONEL FACES DEFEAT]
XXIV [THE PILGRIMS]
XXV [RED IN THE MORNING]
XXVI [THE AVALANCHE MOVES]
XXVII [THE GROWING ROAR]
XXVIII [OLD TOWN]
XXIX [FOLLOW YOUR LEADER]
XXX [THE END OF THE WORLD]
XXXI [THE COLONEL]
XXXII [THE DAY OF JUDGMENT]
XXXIII [BEAU-NEZ]
XXXIV [THE STATION]
XXXV [IN THE EVENING]
XXXVI [RUTH FACES THE STORM]
XXXVII [MRS. LEWKNOR]
XXXVIII [SUSPENSE]
XXXIX [THE VALLEY OF DECISION]
XL [VICTORY AND REVENGE]

[THE COMFORTER]

THE CARRIER'S CART

An old-fashioned carrier's cart, such as you may still meet on the roads of Sussex, tilted, one-horsed, and moving at the leisurely pace of a bye-gone age, turned East at the Turnpike, and made slowly along the Lewes-Beachbourne road under the northern scarp of the Downs one evening of autumn in 1908. In it, at the back of the driver, were a young man and a young woman, the only passengers, ensconced among hen-coops, flitches of bacon, and baskets of greens.

They sat hand-in-hand.

The woman was a noble creature, about her the majestic tranquillity of a great three-decker that comes to rest in sunset waters after its Trafalgar. The man, but for a certain wistfulness about his eyes which betokened undue sensibility, was not remarkable. Till he spoke you would have said he was a gentleman—that is to say if your eyes confined their scrutiny to his face and refused to see his hands, his boots, his clothes. When he spoke you would have recognised at once that he was Sussex of the soil as, surely, was the woman beside him; though the speech of both was faintly marred with the all-pervading cockney accent of those who have passed beyond the village-green into the larger world of the England of to-day.

Both ca-a-ad musically enough; but less by far than the little carrier, whose round back blocked the view of the road, and the twitching ears of old mare Jenny. For nearly fifty years, man and boy, Isaac Woolgar had travelled twice a day, six days a week, the road on which he was travelling now. He had seen the long-horns—those "black runts" so familiar to old-world Sussex—give place to horses in the plough upon the hill; the horses in their turn supplanted on the road by motors; and men using the legs God had given them to trundle wheels instead of walk. Undisturbed, he plodded on his way, accompanied always by the wires lifted on tall black poles, crowned with tiers of tiny porcelain chimney-pots unknown in his youth, which had linked Lewes with Beachbourne these forty years; and he would so plod until he died. The Star on the hill in Old Town, Beachbourne, marked one end of his day's journey; and the equally ancient Lamb, at Aldwoldston, black-timbered and gabled too, marked the other. He had never been further "oop country," as he called it, than Heathfield. Lewes was the utmost term of his wanderings West, Beau-nez East; while the sea at Newhaven had bounded him on the South. Within this tiny quadrilateral, which just about determined also the wanderings of an old dog-fox in Abbot's Wood, he had passed his life; and nothing now would ever induce him to pass the bounds he had allotted himself.

To the man and woman in the cart old Mus. Woolgar had been a familiar figure from childhood. The little girl skipping by the market-cross in Aldwoldston would stop to watch him start; the little boy would wait at Billing's Corner on the top of the hill to see him come along the New Road past Motcombe at the end of his journey. Long before either had been aware of the other's existence the old carrier had served as an invisible link between them.

Now the two were married.

Ruth Boam had become Mrs. Ernie Caspar that afternoon in the cathedral-church of Aldwoldston, on the mound among the ash-trees above Parsons' Tye and the long donkey-backed clergy-house that dates from the fourteenth century.

It had been a very quiet wedding. The father and mother of the bride had stumped across from Frogs' Hall, at the foot of the village, Ruth accompanying them, her little daughter in her arms. For the rest, Dr. and Mrs. Trupp had come over from Beachbourne with Mr. Pigott and his wife in the chocolate-bodied car driven by the bridegroom's brother.

Alf had not entered the church to see Ernie married. He had mouched sullenly down to the river instead, and stood there during the service, his back to the church, looking across the Brooks to old Wind-hover's dun and shaven flank with eyes that did not see, and ears that refused to hear.

After the ceremony the car-party returned to Beachbourne by way of the sea—climbing High-'nd-over, to drop down into Sea-ford, and home by Birling Gap and Beau-nez. From the almost violent gesture with which Alf had set his engines in motion and drawn out of the lane under the pollarded willows of Parson's Tye, he at least had been glad to turn his back on the scene.

Ruth and her husband had returned to Frogs' Hall with the old folk.

Later, as the sun began to lower behind Black Cap into the valley of the Ouse, they went up River Lane and picked up the carrier's cart by the market-cross.

For the moment they were leaving little Alice with her grandmother while they settled into the Moot, Old Town, where Ernie had found a cottage close to his work, not a quarter of a mile from the home of his father and mother in Rectory Walk.

The carrier's cart moved slowly on under the telegraph wires on which the martins were already gathering: for it was September. Now and then Ernie raised the flap that made a little window in the side of the tilt, and looked out at the accompanying Downs, mysterious in the evening.

"They're still there," he announced comfortably, "and like to be yet a bit, I reckon."

"They move much same pace as us doos, seems to me," said Ruth.

"We should get there afoor them yet though," answered Ernie.

"Afoor the Day of Judgment we might, if so be we doosn't die o breathlessness first," the woman replied.

"You'd like a car to yourself you would," chaffed Ernie. "And Alf drivin you."

Ruth turned in her lips.

They moved leisurely forward, leaving Folkington clustered about its village-green upon the right, passing the tea-gardens at Wannock, and up the long pull to Willingdon, standing among old gardens and pleasant fig-trees. Once through the village the woods of Hampden Park green-bosomed upon the left, blocked out the marshes and the splendid vision of Pevensey Bay. Now the road emerged from the shelter of hedges and elm-trees and flowed with a noble billowy motion between seas of corn that washed the foot of the Downs and swept over Rodmill to the outposts of Beachbourne. Between the road and the Downs stood Motcombe, islanded in the ruddy sea, amongst its elms and low piggeries. Behind the farm, at the very foot of the hill, was Huntsman's Lodge where once, when both were boys, Alf had betrayed his brother on the occasion of the looting of the walnut-tree.

Ern pointed out the spot to his bride and told the tale. Ruth listened with grim understanding.

"That's Alf," she said.

"Mr. Pigott lived there that time o day," Ern continued. "One of the five Manors of Beachbourne, used to be—I've heard dad say. Belonged to the Salwyns of Friston Place over the hill—the clergy-folk. The farm's where the Manor-house used to be; and the annual sheep-fair was held in a field outside from William the Conqueror till a few years back."

He pointed to one of a little row of villas on the left which looked over the allotment gardens to the Downs.

"That's where Mr. Pigott lives now. My school-master he were that time o day."

"Who's Mr. Pigott?" Ruth asked.

Ernie rootled her with a friendly elbow.

"My guv'nor, stoopid! Manager of the Southdown Transport Company. Him that was at the wedding—with the beard. Settin along o Mrs. Trupp."

"Oh, Mr. Pigott!" answered Ruth. Now that the strain of the last two years was over at last, she brimmed over with a demure naughtiness. "Well, why couldn't you say so, then? You are funny, men are."

The cart climbed the steep hill to Billing's Corner and Ernie looked down the familiar road to the Rectory and even caught a peep of the back of his old home. Then they turned down Church Street with its old-world fragrance of lavender and yesterday.

On the left the parish-church, long-backed and massive-towered upon the Kneb, brooded over the centuries it had seen come and go.

"Dad says the whole history of Beachbourne's centred there," said Ernie in awed voice. "Steeped in it, he says."

Ernie, who had been leaning forward to peep at the Archdeacon posed in the entrance of St. Michael's, now dropped back suddenly, nudging his companion.

A lean woman with white hair and wrathful black eyebrows, her complexion still delicate as a girl's, was coming up the hill.

"Mother," whispered Ernie.

It was Ruth's turn to raise the flap and peer forth stealthily at the figure passing so close and so unconsciously on the pavement.

So that was the woman who had opposed her marriage with such malevolent persistency!

Ruth observed her enemy with more curiosity than hostility, and received a passing impression of a fierce unhappy face.

"She don't favour you no-ways," she said, as she relapsed into a corner. "Where's dad though?"

Ernie shook his head.

"He's never with her," he said. "I ca-a-n't call to mind as ever I've seen them out together, not the pair of them."

"I'd ha liked him to have been at the wedding," murmured Ruth a thought discontentedly.

"And he'd ha liked it too, I'll lay," Ernie answered. "Only she'd never have let him."

The cart stopped; and the two passengers descended at the old Star opposite the Manor-house, which bore the plate of Mr. William Trupp, the famous surgeon.

On the Manor-house steps a tall somewhat cadaverous man was standing. He was so simply dressed as almost to be shabby; and his straw hat, tilted on the back of his head, disclosed a singularly fine forehead. There was something arresting about the man and his attitude: a delicious mixture of mischievous alertness and philosophical detachment. He might have been a mediæval scholar waiting at the door of his master; or a penitent seeking absolution; or, not least, a youth about to perpetrate a run-away knock.

Ernie across the road watched him with eyes in which affection and amusement mingled. Then the door opened, and the scholar-penitent-youth was being greeted with glee by Bess Trupp.

Ernie turned to his wife.

"My old Colonel," he said confidentially. "What I was in India with. Best Colonel the Hammer-men ever had—and that's saying something."

"Colonel Lewknor, aren't it?" asked Ruth.

"That's him," said Ernie keenly. "Do you knaw him?"

"He was over at Auston last summer," answered Ruth, "lecturin we got to fight Germany or something. I went, but I didn't pay no heed to him. No account talk, I call that."

Together they dropped down Borough Lane and turned to the left along the Moot where dwelt the workers of Old Town—a few in flint cottages set in gardens, rank with currant bushes, a record of the days, not so long ago, when corn flowed down both sides of Water Lane, making a lake of gold between the village on the hill and the Sea-houses by the Wish; and most in the new streets of little red houses that looked up, pathetically aware of their commonness, to the calm dignity of the old church upon the Kneb above.

At one of these latter Ernie stopped and made believe to fumble with a key. Ruth, who had not seen her new home, was thrilling quietly, as she had been throughout the journey, though determined not to betray her emotion to her mate.

The door opened and they entered.

A charming voice from the kitchen greeted them.

"Ah, there you are—punctual to the minute!"

A woman, silver-haired and gracious, turned from deft busy-ness at the range.

"Oh, Mrs. Trupp!" cried Ruth, looking about her.

The table was laid already, and gay with flowers; the fire lit, the kettle on the boil, the supper ready.

"It is kind," said Ruth. "Was this you and Miss Bess?"

"Perhaps we had a hand in it," laughed the other. "She couldn't be here, as she's got a meeting of her Boy Scouts. But she sent her best wishes. Now I hand over the key to the master; and my responsibilities are over!" And she was gone with the delicious ripple of laughter Ernie had loved from babyhood.

Ruth was now thirsting to explore her new home, but Ernie insisted on supping first. This he did with malicious deliberation. When at length he was satisfied they went upstairs together, he leading the way.

"This is our room!" he said with ill-disguised complacency, stepping aside.

The bridal chamber was swept and garnished. In it were more flowers, bowls of them; and the furniture simple, solid, and very good, was of a character rarely found in houses of that class.

Ernie enjoyed the obvious pleasure of his bride as she touched and glanced and dipped like some large bird flitting gracefully from piece to piece.

Then she paused solemnly and looked about her.

"Reckon it must ha cost a tidy penny," she said.

"It did," Ernie answered.

She cocked a soft brown eye at him.

"Could you afford it, Ernie?"

"I could not," said Ernie, standing grimly and with folded arms.

At the moment her eyes fell on a card tied to the bed-post on which was written: From Mr., Mrs. and Miss Trupp. Ruth's eyes caressed the bed, and her fingers stroked the smooth wood.

"It's like them," she said. "None o your cheap trash."

"Ah," answered Ernie. "Trust them. They're just all right, they are."

Before the looking-glass on the chest of drawers Ruth now took off her hat.

She was perhaps too simple, too natural, too near to earth to be shy at this the supreme moment of a woman's life. At least she was too wary to show it.

"Rich folks they have two little beds laid alongside, these days," she said, speaking from her experience as a maid. "I wouldn't think it was right myself. Only you mustn't judge others." She added in her slow way, as she patted her hair—"I wouldn't feel prarperly married like only in a prarper two-bed."

Ernie drew down the blind.

Then he marched upon his bride deliberately and with remorseless eyes. Suddenly she turned and met him with a swift and lovely smile, dropping her mask, and discovering herself to him in the surprising radiance of a moon that reveals its beauty after long obscurity. She laid her hands upon his shoulders in utter surrender. He gathered her gradually in his arms; and closing his eyes, dwelt on her lips with the slow and greedy passion of a bee, absorbed in absorption, and drinking deep in the cloistered seclusion of a fox-glove bell,

"You're prarperly married all right," he said. "And you ca-a-n't get out of it—not no-ways."

PART I
DEEPENING DUSK

CHAPTER I
THE HOSTEL

Dr. Trupp of Beachbourne, as he was generally known—Mr. Trupp, to give him his correct title—was a genuinely great man.

His father had been a book-seller in Torquay; and he himself never lost the greater qualities of the class from which he sprang. He was very simple and very shrewd. Science had not blunted the fine intuitions which his brusque manner half concealed. Moreover, he trusted those intuitions perhaps unconsciously as do few men of his profession; and they rarely played him false. In early manhood his integrity, his sound common sense, and practical idealism had won for him the love of a singularly noble girl who might have married one of the best of her inevitably artificial class. Later in life indeed Evelyn Trupp often would amuse her father and annoy her mother by affirming that she was far prouder of being the wife of Mr. Trupp of Beachbourne than of having been Miss Moray of Pole. And she had good cause. For her husband was no longer the country doctor at whom the county families had sniffed. He was "Trupp of Beachbourne," whose fame had spread, quietly it is true, from Sussex, through England to the outer world. And if there was some difference of opinion as to whether Mr. Trupp had made Beachbourne, or Beachbourne had made him, there was no question that the growth of the town, and its deserved popularity as a health-resort was coincident with his residence there.

At least the event justified the young surgeon's courage and originality in the choice of a site for his life-long campaign. Indeed had he stayed in London it is certain that he would never have achieved the work he was able to consummate in the town girdled by the southern hills and washed by Northern Seas. And that work was no mean contribution to the welfare of the race. Mr. Trupp was a pioneer in the organized attack on perhaps the deadliest and most pertinacious enemy that threatens the supremacy of Man—the tubercle bacillus. And his choice of a point-d'appui from which to conduct his offensive was no small factor in his success.

He was, moreover, one of the men who in the last years of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of this set himself to stem the tide of luxury which in his judgment was softening the spines of the younger generation. And the helpful buffets which gave him his name, and were responsible at least for some of his triumphs, were not the outcome of spasms of irritability but of a deliberate philosophy.

For Mr. Trupp, despite his kind heart, never forgot that Man with all his aspirations after heaven had but yesterday ceased to be an animal and still stood on the edge of the slough from which he had just emerged, up to his hocks in mud, the slime yet trickling from his shaggy sides.

"Don't give him sympathy," he would sometimes say to an astonished father. "What he wants is the Big Stick ... Stop his allowance. He'll soon get well. Necessity's the best doctor.... Take her mother away from her. The mothers make half the invalids.... Let her get up early in the morning and take the kitchen-maid tea in bed. She's a useful citizen at all events."

He saw his country, so he believed, sinking into a dropsical coma before his eyes, just for want of somebody to kick it awake; and the sight made him sick and fearful.

Often riding with his daughter of evenings after the day's work he would pause a moment beside the flag-staff on Beau-nez and look North East across the waste of sea dull or shining at his feet.

"Can you hear him growling, Bess?" he asked his companion once.

"Who?"

"The Brute."

Bess knew her father's ogre, and the common talk.

"Is Germany the Brute?" she asked.

Her father shook his head.

"One of them," he answered. "Wherever Man is there the Brute is—keep that in mind when you're married, my dear. And he's always sleeping after a gorge or ravenous before one. Our Brute's asleep now he's got his belly full. Theirs"—nodding across the water—"is prowling for his prey."

To Mr. Pigott he confided his belief that there was only one thing that could save England.

"What's that?" asked the old school-master.

"A bloody war," replied Mr. Trupp.

Many other men were saying the same thing, but few of his intellectual calibre, and none of his radical views.

His own part in staying the rot that in his belief threatened to corrupt the country he loved with such a deep if critical love, was clear enough. It was the business of him and his colleagues to give the nation the health that made for character, just as it was that of the school-master to give them the character that made for health. And he tackled his side of national education with a will: the Sun, the Sea, the Air being the assistants in whom he trusted.

His old idea, cherished through a life-time, of an open-air hostel, where he could have under his immediate supervision children without their mothers, and wives without their husbands, sought always more urgently for expression as the years slipped by. It was not, however, till the twentieth century was well upon its way, that all the conditions necessary for the safe launching of his project were fulfilled.

His chance came when Colonel Lewknor and his wife crossed his path on retirement from the Sendee.

Rachel Lewknor took up the old surgeon's plan with the fierce yet wary courage of her race.

Here was her chance, heaven-sent. Thus and thus would she fulfil her cherished dream and make the money to send her grandson, Toby, to Eton like his father and grandfather before him.

Like most soldiers, she and the Colonel were poor. All through their working lives any money they might have saved against old age they had invested in the education of their boy; stinting themselves in order to send young Jock to his father's school and afterwards to start him in his father's regiment. On retirement therefore they had little but a pittance of a pension on which to live. The question of how to raise the capital to buy the site and build the hostel was therefore the most urgent of the earlier difficulties that beset Mrs. Lewknor.

Mr. Trupp said frankly that he could lend the money and would do so at a pinch; but he made it clear that he would rather not. He, too, was starting his boy Joe in the Hammer-men, and like all civilians of those days had an exaggerated idea of the expenses of an officer in the Army. Moreover, he had determined that when the time and the man came Bess should marry where she liked; and the question of money should not stand in her way.

Happily Mrs. Lewknor's problem solved itself as by miracle.

Alf Caspar, who had his garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old Town and, in spite of the continued protests of Mrs. Trupp and Bess, still drove for Mr. Trupp (the old surgeon refusing steadfastly to keep a car of his own), had from the start evinced an almost prurient interest in the conception of the hostel. In the very earliest days when Mr. Trupp and Mrs. Lewknor talked it over as they drove through Paradise, the beech-hangar between old Town and Meads, to visit the prospective site in Cow Gap, he would sit at his wheel manipulating his engine to ensure the maximum of silent running, his head screwed round and big left ear reaching back to lick up what was passing between the two occupants of the body of the car.

Later, when it had actually been decided to embark upon the scheme, he said to Mr. Trupp one day in his brightest manner:

"Should be a paying proposition, sir, with you behind it."

The old surgeon eyed his chaffeur through his pince-nez shrewdly.

"If you like to put £3,000 or so into it, Alfred, you wouldn't do yourself any harm," he said.

Alf sheathed his eyes in that swift bird-like way of his, and tittered.

"Three thousand pounds!" he said. "Me!" ....

A few days later when Mr. Trupp called at the Colonel's tiny villa in Meads. Mrs. Lewknor ran out to him, eager as a girl.

She had received from Messrs. Morgan and Evans, the solicitors in Terminus Road, an offer of the sum required on behalf of a client on the security of a first mortgage.

"It's a miracle!" she cried, her eyes sparkling like jewels.

"Or a ramp!" said the Colonel from behind. "D'you know anything about the firm, Trupp?"

"I've known and employed em ever since I've been here," replied the old surgeon. "They're as old as Beachbourne and a bit older. A Lewes firm really, and they still have an office there. But as the balance of power shifted East they shifted with it."

"They don't say who their client is," commented the Colonel.

"I'll ask em," the other answered.

That afternoon he drove down to Terminus Road, and leaving Alf in the car outside, entered the office.

He and Mr. Morgan were old friends who might truly be accounted among the founders of modern Beachbourne.

"Who's your client?" asked Mr. Trupp, gruff and grinning. "Out with it!"

Mr. Morgan shook his smooth grey head, humour and mystery lurking about his mouth and in his eyes.

"Wishes to remain anonymous," he said. "We're empowered to act on his behalf."

He strolled to the window and peeped out, tilting on his toes to overlook the screen which obscured the lower half of it.

What he saw seemed to amuse him, and his amusement seemed to re-act in its turn on Mr. Trupp.

"Is he a solid man?" asked the surgeon.

"As a rock," came the voice from the window.

The other seemed satisfied; the contract forthwith was signed; and Mrs. Lewknor bought her site.

Cow Gap was an ideal spot for the hostel.

It is carved out of the flank of Beau-nez; the gorse-covered hill encircling it in huge green rampart that shelters it from the prevailing Sou-West gales. Embedded in the majestic bluff that terminates the long line of the South Downs and juts out into the sea in the semblance of a lion asleep, head on his paws, it opens a broad green face to the sea and rising sun. The cliff here is very low, and the chalk-strewn beach, easy of access from above, is seldom outraged by skirmishers from the great army peopling the sands along the front towards the Redoubt and the far Crumbles. A spur of the hill shuts it off from the aristocratic quarter of the town, known as Meads, which covers with gardened villas the East-ward foot-hills of Beau-nez and ceases abruptly at the bottom of the Duke's Drive that sweeps up the Head in graceful curves.

In this secluded coombe, that welcomes the sun at dawn, at dusk holds the lingering shadows, and is flecked all day with the wings of passing sea-birds, after many months of delay and obstructions victoriously overcome, Mrs. Lewknor began to build her house of bricks and mortar in the spring of the year Ruth and Ernie Caspar set out together to construct the future in a more enduring medium.

The house, long and low, with balconies broad as streets, and windows everywhere to catch the light, rose layer by layer out of the turf on the edge of the cliff. All the summer and on into the autumn it was a-building. A white house with a red roof, plain yet picturesque, it might have been a coastguard station and was not. Partaking of the character of the cliffs on which it stood and the green Downs in which it was enclosed, it seemed a fitting tenant of the great coombe in which, apart from a pair of goal-posts under the steep of the hill at the back, it was the only evidence of the neighbourhood of Man.

Mr. Trupp watched the gradual realisation of the dream of a lifetime with the absorbed content of a child who observes the erection of a house of wooden bricks. And he was not alone.

When at the end of the day's work Alf now drove his employer, as he often did, to Cow Gap to study progress, he, too, would descend and poke and pry amid skeleton walls and crude dank passages with sharp eyes and sharper whispered questions to labourers, foreman, and even the architect. Never a Sunday passed but found him bustling across the golf-links before church, to ascend ladders, walk along precarious scaffoldings, and march with proprietory air and incredible swagger along the terraces of the newly laid-out gardens that patched with brown the green quilt of the coombe.

Once, on such a Sunday visit, he climbed the hill at the back to obtain a bird's-eye view of the building. Amid spurting whin-chats and shining gossamers, he climbed in the brilliant autumn morning till he had almost reached the crest. He was lost to the world and the beauty lavished all about him; his eyes shuttered to the whispered suggestions of the infinite; his heart closed to the revealing loveliness of Earth, round-limbed and bare, as he revolved in the dark prison-house of self the treadmill of his insect projects. The sidesman of St. Michael's, spruce, scented, oiled, in fancy waistcoat, with boots of glace kid, and waxed moustache, moving laboriously between sky and sea, was civilised man at the height of his imperfection and vain-glorious in his fatuous artificiality.

Suddenly a bare head and collarless stark neck blurted up out of a deep gorse-clump before him.

"Who goes there?" came a challenge, deep and formidable, as the roar of some jungle lord disturbed in his covert.

Alf collapsed as a soap-bubble, blown from a clay pipe and brilliant in the sunshine, bursts at the impact of an elemental prickle. He fled down the hill incontinently.

The man who had barked, shoulder-deep in gorse, his eyes still flashing, turned to the woman squandered beneath him in luxurious splendour. Native of the earth on which she lay, and kin to it as some long-limbed hind of the forest, she regarded him with amused content. The sudden battle-call of her male roused what there was of primitive in her, soothed, and flattered her womanhood. Comfortably she fell back upon the sense of security it called up, delighting behind half-drawn lids in the surprising ferocity of her man. That roar of his, startling the silence like a trumpet-note, had spoken to her deeps. Swiftly, and perhaps for the first time, she recognised what the man above her stood for in her life, and why one with whom she did not pretend to be in love so completely satisfied her most urgent present need. He was a break-water behind which she lay with furled sails after a hazardous voyage over uncharted deeps. Outside was still the roar and batter of seas. The sound of guns booming overhead as she lay, stripped of her canvas, and rocking pleasantly in the inner waters, did not alarm, rather indeed lulled, her to sleep: for they spoke to her of protection at last.

"Who was it, Ernie?" she murmured, raising a lazy head from the hands on which they were pillowed, the dark hair strewn about her like wind-slashed rain.

The man turned, outraged still and bristling.

"Alf!" he snorted. "Just bob me head over the hawth at him. That was enough—quite enough! I knaw the colour of Alf's liver."

He stood above her with his air of a fighting male.

She had never seen him like that before; and she regarded him critically and with approval.

"Ern," she called quietly, with a chuckle, deep and secret as the gurgle of water pouring from a long-throated jug; and with a faint movement of her hips she made room for him in the sand beside her.

CHAPTER II
COW GAP

Honeymoons are not for the class that does the world's dirty work; but joy can be seized by the simple of heart even in the conditions we impose upon the poor.

Ernie Caspar after his marriage with Ruth Boam settled down with his bride in Old Town to enjoy the fruits of victory.

The young couple had been lucky to find a cottage in the Moot; for even in those days accommodation for the working-class was as hard to find in Beachbourne as elsewhere. The cottage, too, was appropriately situated for them in every way. It was close to the yard of the Southdown Transport Company, where Ernie's work lay; and at the bottom of Borough Lane, at the top of which was the Manor-house, where lived Mr. and Mrs. Trupp, who had seen Ruth through her trouble, and had befriended Ernie from his boyhood.

"D'you remember that first time ever we rode up to Old Town together tarp o the bus?" asked Ernie of his bride, one evening as they passed the great doctor's house on the way to Beau-nez.

"Hap I do," Ruth answered, amused at her lover's intense seriousness.

"And do you remember what I said to you?" insistently.

"Ne'er a word," answered Ruth, casual and teasing—"only it was no-account talk. That's all I remember."

"I pointed you out Mr. Trupp's house," Ernie continued solemnly, "and I says to you—He brought me into the world, I says. That's what he done."

The old roguish black-bird look, which after her winter of despair had been creeping slowly back to Ruth's face in this new spring, gleamed sedately now.

"I mind me now," she said. "Leastwise I don't remember what you said, but I remembers what I answered."

"What did you answer then?" asked Ernie, suspiciously.

"He done well, was what I says," answered the young woman gravely.

"He did," replied Ernie with exaggerated pomp. "And he done better to settle issalf at my door so I could be his friend if so be he ever gotten into trouble."

"One thing I knaw," said Ruth, serious in her turn now. "They're the two best friends e'er a workin woman had."

"They are," Ernie agreed. "And she's my god-mother."

It was the fact in his life of which on the whole he was most proud and certainly the one for which he was least responsible. "And she aren't yours," he continued, puffed up and self-complacent. "And never will be." He added finally to curb her arrogance. "See she was dad's friend afore ever they married, eether of them."

Ruth checked her husband's snobbishness with a tap.

"You are grand," she said.

Close to the cottage of the young couple was the lovely old Motcombe garden, public now, pierced by the bourne from which the town derives its name. The garden with its ancient dove-cot, ivy-crowned, its splendid weeping ashes, its ruined walls, compact of native flint and chalk, the skeletons of afore-time barns and byres, stands between the old parsonage house and older parish-church that crowns the Kneb above and, with its massive tower, its squat shingled spire peculiar to Sussex, set four-square to the winds of time, seems lost in a mist of memories.

Beyond the church, a few hundred yards further up the hill, at the back of Billing's Corner in Rectory Walk, Ernie's parents still dwelt.

Anne Caspar did not visit Ruth. Indeed, she ignored the presence of her daughter-in-law; but those steel-blue eyes of hers sought out and recognized in a hard flash the majestic peasant girl who now haunted Church Street at shopping hours as the woman who had married her son. Ernie's mother was in fact one of those who make it a point of duty, as well as a pleasure, never to forgive. She had neither pardoned Ruth for daring to be her daughter-in-law, nor forgotten her sin. And both offences were immeasurably accentuated by Ruth's crime in establishing herself in the Moot.

"Settlin on my door-step," she said. "Brassy slut!"

"Just like her," her second son answered; and added with stealthy malice, "Dad visits em. I seen im."

Alf, for all his acuteness, had never learned the simple lesson that his mother would not tolerate the slightest criticism of her old man.

"And why shouldn't he?" she asked sharply. "Isn't Ern his own flesh-and-blood? He's got a heart, dad has, if some as ought to ave aven't."

"No reason at all," answered Alf, looking down his nose. "Why shouldn't he be thick in with her—and with her child for the matter of that? I see him walkin in the Moot the other day near the Quaker meeting-house hand-in-hand with little Alice. Pretty as a Bible picture it struck me."

Anne Caspar stared stonily.

"Who's little Alice?" she asked.

"Her love-child," answered Alf. "Like your grand-child as you might say—only illegit o course."

His mother breathed heavily.

"Is Ern the father?" she asked at last in a sour flat voice.

"Not him!" jeered Alf. "She's a rich man's cast-off, Ruth is. Made it worth Ern's while. That's where it was. See, cash is cash in this world."

Anne laid back her ears as she rummaged among her memories,

"I thought you told me," she began slowly, "as Ern—"

"Never!" cried Alf. "Ern had nothin to do with it, who-ever had."

"Who was the father?" asked Anne, not above a little feminine curiosity.

Alf shook his head cunningly.

"Ah," he said, "now you're askin!" and added after a moment's pause:—

"She was all-the-world's wench one time o day, your daughter was. That's all I can tell you."

Anne stirred a saucepan thoughtfully. She did not believe Alf: for she knew that Ernie was far too much his father's son to be bought disgracefully, and she remembered suddenly a suggestion that Mr. Pigott had lately thrown out to the effect that Alf himself had not been altogether proof against the seductions of this seductive young woman his brother had won. It struck her now that there might be something in the story after all, unlikely as it seemed: for she remarked that Alf always pursued his sister-in-law with the covert rancour and vindictiveness of the mean spirit which has met defeat.

But however doubtful she might be in her own heart of Alf's tale, the essential facts about Ruth were not in dispute: her daughter-in-law was the mother of an illegitimate child and had settled down with that child not a quarter of a mile away. Everybody knew the story, especially of course the neighbours she would least wish to know it—the Archdeacon and Lady Augusta in the Rectory across the way. For over thirty years Anne had lived in her solid little blue-slated house, the ampelopsis running over its good red face, the tobacco plants sweet on summer evenings in the border round the neat and tidy lawn, holding her nose high, too high her enemies averred, and priding herself above all women on her respectability—and now!

No wonder Ernie, bringing home his bride and his disgrace, infuriated her.

"Shamin me afore em all!" she muttered time and again with sullen wrath to the pots and pans she banged about on the range.

She never saw the offender now except on Sundays when he came up to visit his father, which he did as regularly as in the days before his marriage. The ritual of these visits was always the same. Ernie would come in at the front-door; she would give him a surly nod from the kitchen; he would say quietly—"Hullo, mum!" and turn off into the study where his dad was awaiting him.

The two, Anne remarked with acrimony, grew always nearer and—what annoyed her most—talked always less. Edward Caspar was an old man now, in body if not in years; and on the occasion of Ernie's visits father and son rarely strolled out to take the sun on the hill at the back or lounge in the elusive shade of Paradise as in former days. They were content instead to sit together in the austere little study looking out on to the trees of the Rectory, Lely's famous Cavalier, the first Lord Ravensrood, glancing down from the otherwise bare walls with wistful yet ironic eyes on his two remote descendants enjoying each other beneath in a suspicious communion of silence.

Thus Anne always found the pair when she brought them their tea; and the mysterious intimacy between the two was all the more marked because of her husband's almost comical unawareness of his second son. The genuine resentment Anne experienced in the matter of Edward's unvarying attitude towards his two sons she visited, regardless of justice, upon Alf.

"Might not be a son to your father the way you go on!" she said censoriously.

"And what about him," cried Alf, not without reason. "Might not be a father to your son, seems to me."

It would, however, have taken more than Anne Caspar's passionate indignation at the action of Ernie and his bride in establishing themselves in the Moot to cloud the lives of the newly-married couple. Ern was now twenty-eight, and Ruth four years younger. They had the present, which they enjoyed; they did not worry about the future; and the past inevitably buries itself in time.

"We're young yet, as Mr. Trupp says," remarked Ernie. "We've got it all afore us. Life's not so bad for all they say. I got you: and you got me; and the rest don't matter."

They were lying on Beau-nez in the dusk above Cow Gap, listening to the long-drawn swish of the sea, going and coming with the tranquil rhythm that soothes the spirit of man, restless in Time, with rumours of forgotten Eternity.

"And we both got little Alice," murmured Ruth, eyes resting on his with affectionate confidence, sure of his love for her and the child that was not his.

"Keep me cosy, Ern," whispered the luxurious creature with a delicious mixture of entreaty and authority snuggling up against him. She was lying, her face lifted flower-wise to the moon that hung above her bubble-like and benignant, her eyes closed, her lips tilted to tempt the pollen-bearing bee, while about them the lovely laughter brimmed and dimpled.

"I'll keep you cosy, my beauty," replied Ernie, with the busy seriousness of the male intent on love. "I'll give you plenty beside little Alice to think of afore I'm done with you. I'll learn you. Don't you worrit. I know what you want."

"What then?" asked Ruth, deep and satisfied.

"Why, basketfuls o babies—armfuls of em, like cowslips till you're fairly smothered, and spill em over the field because you can't hold em all."

Perhaps he was right. Certainly after the battle and conflict of the last two years Ruth felt spiritually lazy. She browsed and drowsed, content that Ernie for the time being should master her. It was good for him, too, she saw, so long as he would do it, correcting his natural tendency to slackness; and she had little doubt that she could assume authority at will in the future, should it prove necessary. Meanwhile that spirit of adventure which lurked in her; distinguished her from her class; and had already once led her into danger and catastrophe, was lulled to sleep for the moment.

The hill at the back of Cow Gap is steep, and towards the crest the gorse grows thick and very high. In the heart of this covert, dense enough to satisfy the most jealous lovers, Ernie had made a safe retreat. He had cut away the resisting gorse with a bill-hook, rooted up the stumps, stripped the turf and made a sleeping-place of sand brought up from the shore. In a rabbit-hole hard by, he hid a spirit-lamp and sundry stores of tea and biscuits; while Mrs. Trupp routed out from her coach-house an immense old carriage umbrella dating from Pole days which, when unfurled, served to turn a shower.

Ruth and Ernie called their hiding-place the Ambush; for in it they could harbour, seeing all things, yet themselves unseen. And there, through that brilliant autumn, they would pass their week-ends, watching Under-cliff, as the hostel was called, rising up out of the saucer of the coombe beneath them. They would leave little Alice with a neighbour, and lock up the cottage in the Moot, which Ruth was swiftly transfiguring into a home. On Saturday evenings, after a hard afternoon's work, stripping, papering, painting, making the old new and the dull bright, the pair would walk up Church Street, turn to the left at Billing's Corner, and dropping down Love Lane by the Rectory, cross the golf links and mount the hill by the rabbit-walk that leads above Paradise, past the dew-pond, on to the broad-strewn back of Beau-nez. Up there, surrounded by the dimming waters and billowing land, they would wait till the Head was deserted by all save a tethered goat and watchful coastguard; till in the solitude and silence the stars whispered, and the darkening turf, grateful for the falling dew, responded sweetly to their pressing feet. Then the young couple, taking hands, would leave the crest and find their way with beating hearts along the track that led through the covert to their couching-place, where none would disturb them except maybe a hunting stoat; and only the moon would peep at them under the shaggy eyebrow of the gorse as they rejoiced in their youth, their love, their life.

And then at dawn when the sun glanced warily over the brim of the sea and none was yet astir save the kestrel hovering in the wind; and the pair of badgers—who with the amazing tenacity of their kind still tenanted the burrows of their ancestors within a quarter of a mile of the tents and tabernacles of man—rooted and sported clumsily on the dewy hillside beneath; they would rise and slip bare-foot down the hill, past the hostel, on to the deserted beach, there to become one with the living waters, misty and lapping, as at night they had entered into communion with earth and sky and the little creaking creatures of the dark.

"This is life," Ernie said on one such Sabbath dawn, sinking into the waters with deep content. "Wouldn't old dad just love this?"

"If it were like this all the time!" Ruth answered a thought wistfully as she floated with paddling hands, sea and sky, as it was in the beginning, enveloping her. "Like music in church. Just the peace that passeth understanding, as my Miss Caryll'd say."

"Ah," said Ernie, speaking with the profound sagacity that not seldom marks the words of the foolish. "Might be bad for us. If there was nothing to fight we'd all be like to go to sleep. That's what Mr. Trupp says."

"Some of us might," said Ruth, the girl slyly peeping forth from her covering womanhood.

"Look at Germany!" continued the wise man, surging closer. "Look at what the Colonel said the other night at the Institute. We're the rabbits; and Germany's the python, the Colonel says."

"That for Germany!" answered Ruth, splashing the water with the flat of her hand in the direction of the rising sun.

"And she's all the while a-creepin—a-creepin—closer acrarst the sea," said Ernie, edging nearer—"for to SWALLOW US UP!" And with a rush he engulfed her young body in his arms.

CHAPTER III
THE WATCHMAN ON THE HEAD

On one of the last days of that brilliant October, just before the grey curtain of rains descended to blot out autumn fields and twinkling waters, Colonel Lewknor and his wife moved into the hostel.

On that first evening Mrs. Lewknor came down the broad stair-case in "review order," as she called it, to celebrate the consummation of the first stage of her project, and found her husband standing at the sea-ward window of the hall, a Mestophelian figure, holding back the curtain and peeping out. Quietly she came and stood beside him, about her shoulders the scarlet cape a Rajput Princess had given her after Lord Curzon's durbar.

The house, which was the solitary building in the great coombe, stood back some hundred yards from the cliff along which the coast-guard's path to Beau-nez showed up white-dotted in the darkness. The Colonel was staring out over the misty and muffled waters, mumbling to himself, as was his way.

"We shall get a nice view from here, anyway," he said with his satyr-like chuckle.

She laid her hand upon his shoulder.

"Of what?" she asked.

"The landing," he replied.

She rippled off into a delicious titter. After thirty years of married life her Jocko was still for Rachel Lewknor the most entertaining of men.

"You and Mr. Trupp!" she said. "A pair of you!" For the two men had drawn singularly close since the Colonel on retirement had established himself in Meads.

The old soldier in truth came as something of a revelation to the great surgeon, who delighted in the other's philosophical mind, his freedom from the conventional limitations and prejudices of the officer-caste, his wide reading and ironical humour.

On his evening ride one day about this time Mr. Trupp and Bess came upon the Colonel halted at the flag-staff on the top of the Head, and gazing out over the wide-spread waters with solemn eyes, as though watching for a tidal wave to sweep up out of the East and overwhelm his country. Mr. Trupp knew that the old soldier was often at that spot in that attitude at that hour, a sentinel on guard at the uttermost end of the uttermost peninsula that jutted out into the Channel; and he knew why.

"Well, is it coming?" the doctor growled, half serious, half chaffing.

The Colonel, standing with his hat off, his fine forehead and cadaverous face thrusting up into the blue, answered with quiet conviction.

"It's coming all right."

"It's been coming all my time," answered the other sardonically. "If it don't come soon I shall miss it. In the seventies it was Russia. Any fool, who wasn't a criminal or a traitor or both, could see that a clash was inevitable. Two great races expanding at incredible speed in Asia, etc., etc. Then in the nineties it was France. Any man in his right mind could see it. It was mathematically demonstrable. Two great races expanding in Africa, etc., etc.... And now it's Germany..." He coughed and ended gruffly, "Well, you may be right this time."

"We were right about William the Conqueror," said the Colonel urbanely. "He came."

"But that was some time ago, my daughter tells me," replied Mr. Trupp. "And you've been wrong every time since."

Bess giggled; and the Colonel adjusted his field-glasses with delicate precision.

"If you say it's going to rain and keep on saying it long enough you'll probably prove right in the end," he remarked. "It's dogged as does it in the realm of speculation as elsewhere in my experience."

The old surgeon and his daughter turned their backs on the flagstaff and the solitary watchman beside it, and jogged towards the sunset red-strewn behind the white bluff of the Seven Sisters Newhaven-way.

Two figures topped the brow of Warren Hill in front and came swiftly over the short turf towards them. It was Saturday: Ruth and Ernie were on their way to their secret covert above Cow Gap as usual.

"About your last week-end up here before the weather breaks, I should say," chaffed the old surgeon as he passed them.

Ernie laughed a little nervously.

"Yes, sir. Just what I were a-sayin to Ruth," he answered. He had thought his secret known to none.

"Well, I hope the police won't catch you," remarked the other with a grin as he rode on.

"Never!—not unless someone was to give us away, sir!" said Ruth demurely, as she looked across the sea under lowered brows.

Bess called back reassuringly over her shoulder:

"You're all right, Ruth. I'll square Mr. Trupp."

The riders struck Duke's Drive and dropped down into Meads.

"How happy Ernie looks now!" said Bess. "It's delightful to see him."

"Yes," replied her father—"too happy. He's going to sleep again—just what I told you. And when he's well away in the land of dreams IT'll pounce on him once more."

That evening over his coffee Mr. Trupp returned to the subject, which was a favourite with him.

"I always knew how it would be," he said with gloomy complacency.

"Of course," answered Mrs. Trupp, glancing mischievously at Bess.

"Makes him too comfortable," the wise man continued. "Fatal mistake. What he wants is an occasional flick with the whip to keep him up to the mark. We all do."

It was not, indeed, in Ruth's nature to use the whip or inspire the fear which few of us as yet are able to do without. And at present she did not bother much. For at first her beauty and spiritual power were quite enough to hold Ernie. He found in her the comfort and the stay the tree finds in the earth it is rooted in. She was the element in which he lived and moved and had his being. She satisfied his body and his spirit as the sea satisfies the fish which dwells in it. She steadied him and that was what he needed.

The marriage, indeed, proved as successful as are most. That is to say it was not a failure, in that both the contracting parties were on the whole the happier for it. Certainly Ern was: for there was no doubt that he was in love with Ruth, nor that his love was real and enduring.

Ruth on her side was fond of Ern, and grateful to him, if only because of little Alice; although her feeling was more that of the mother for the child than of the woman for her mate. She was full of pity for him and occasionally unuttered resentment. That was inevitable because Ern was weak. She had continually to prop him up, though she would rather have let him do the propping. And perhaps for her own growth it was good that she must give support rather than receive it.

In a way she was not the ideal wife for Ern: her strength was her weakness. She appeared almost too big of soul and tranquil of spirit. But there was another side of her, largely undeveloped, that had as yet only revealed itself in gleams, or rather, to be exact, in one lurid flash of lightning which had thrown her firmament into ghastly and twittering relief. Her quiet was the hushed and crouching quiet of the young lilac in winter, lying secretly in wait for the touch of April sun, to leap forth from its covert in an amazing ecstasy of colour, fragrance, loveliness and power.

For the time being Ruth was glad to lie up, as a tigress in whelp, after long hunting, is content to harbour in the green darkness, drinking in draughts of refreshing through sleep, while her mate prowls out at dusk to find meat. But that would not last for ever. Her life must be full and brimming over or her insatiable vitality and that all-devouring spirit of hers, reaching out like a creeper to embrace the world, might find outlet in mischief, innocent enough in the intention, and yet, as experience had already proved, catastrophic in its consequences.

In her secret deeps, indeed, Ruth was one to whom danger was the breath of life, although she was still unaware of it: an explorer and pioneer, gay and gallant, sailing her skiff over virgin oceans, reckless of the sunken reefs that might at any moment rip the bottom out of her frail craft. The outward sedateness of the Sussex peasant was liable at any moment to sudden overthrow, as some chance spark caused the southern blood in her veins to leap and frolic into flame; and that Castilian hidalgo, her remote ancestor, who lurked behind the arras of the centuries, called her away from the timid herd to some dear and desperate enterprise of romance.

Mrs. Trupp alone was aware of this buccaneer quality hidden in the young woman's heart and undiscovered of the world. Ruth's Miss Caryll had told her friend of it long ago when the girl was in her service at the Dower-house, Aldwoldston.

"It's the Spaniard in her," Miss Caryll had said.

And when at the time of her distress Ruth had told her story to the wife of the great surgeon who had succoured her, Mrs. Trupp, keen-eyed for all her gentleness, had more than once detected the flash of a sword in the murk of the tragedy.

The girl had dared—and been defeated. She would dare again—until she found her conqueror: thus Mrs. Trupp envisaged the position.

Was Ernie that man?

CHAPTER IV
ALF

Then a child lifted its tiny sail on the far horizon. Its rippling approach across the flood-tides absorbed Ruth and helped Ernie: for he had in him much of his father's mysticism, and was one of those men who go through life rubbing their eyes as the angels start up from the dusty road, and they see miracles on every side where others only find the prosaic permutations and combinations of mud. And this particular miracle, taking place so deliberately beneath his roof, a miracle of which he was the unconscious agent, inspired and awed him.

"Makes you sweat to think of it," he said to a mate in the yard.

"By then you've had half-a-dozen and got to keep em, you'll sweat less," retorted his friend, who had been married several years.

Mr. Trupp looked after Ruth.

Great man as he was now, he still attended faithfully those humble families who had supported him when first he had established himself in Old Town thirty years before, young, unknown, his presence fiercely resented by the older practitioners.

When Ruth's time came, Ernie sat in the kitchen, shaken to the soul, and listening to the feet in the room above.

It was a dirty night, howling, dark and slashed with rain. Outside in the little dim street that ran below the Kneb on which loomed the shadowy bulk of the parish-church, solid against the cloud-drift, stood the doctor's car.

Once Ernie went to the rain-sluiced window and saw Alf with his collar turned up crouching behind the wheel.

Ernie went out into the flapping night.

"Ere, Alf!" he said hoarsely. "We can't go on like this. Tain't in nature. After all, we're brothers."

The two had not spoken since the one had possessed the woman the other had desired.

Alf now showed himself curiously complacent.

"I am a Christian all right," he confided to his brother; and added with the naïve self-satisfaction of the megalomaniac, as he shook hands: "I wish there was more like me, I do reelly."

"Come in, then," said Ern, who was not listening. "I can't abear to see you out here such a night as this and all."

Alf came in.

The two brothers sat over the fire in the kitchen, Alf uplifted, his gaitered legs crossed. He looked about him brightly with that curious proprietory air of his.

"You've a decent little crib here, Ern, I see," he said.

"None so bad," Ernie answered briefly.

"Done it up nice too," the other continued. "Did your landlord do that now?"

"No; me and Ruth atween us."

"Ah, he'll raise your rent against you."

"Like em," said Ern. "They're all the same."

Somebody moved overhead.

Ern, stirred to his deeps, rose and stood, leaning his forehead on the mantel-piece, his ears aloft.

"This is a bad job, Ern," said Alf—"a shockin bad job."

"It's killin me," Ern answered with the delicious egoism of the male at such moments.

There was a lengthy silence. Then Alf spoke again—casually this time.

"She never said nothin to you about no letter, did she?"

"It's burned," replied Ernie curtly.

Alf glanced at his brother sharply. Then, satisfied that the other was in fact telling the truth, he resumed his study of the fire.

"Not as there was anythink in it there shouldn't have been," he said complacently. "You can ask anyone." He was silent for a time. Then he continued confidentially, leaning forward a little—"When you see her tell her I'm safe. May be that'll ease her a bit."

Ernie came to himself and glowered.

"What ye mean?" he asked.

Alf cocked his chin, knowing and mysteriously.

"Ah," he said. "You just tell her what I tell you—Alf won't let on; Alf's safe. Just that. You'll see."

There was a stir and a movement in the room above: then the howl of a woman in travail.

Ern was panting. Silence succeeded the storm. Then a tiny miaowing from the room above came down to them.

Alf started to his feet.

"What's that?" he cried.

"My child," answered Ernie deeply, lifting a blind face to the ceiling.

Alf was afraid of many things; but most of all he feared children, and was brutal to them consequently, less from cruelty, as the unimaginative conceived, than in self-defence. And the younger the child the more he feared it. The presence in the house of this tiny creature, emerging suddenly into the world from the darkness of the Beyond with its mute and mysterious message, terrified him.

"Here! I'm off!" he said. "This ain't the place for me," and he left the house precipitately.

Mrs. Trupp of course went to visit the young mother. Ruth in bed, nursing her babe, met her with a smile that was radiant yet wistful.

"It's that different to last time," she said, and nodded at little Alice playing with her beads at the foot of the bed. "See, she'd no one—only her mother ... and you ... and Mr. Trupp. They were all against her—poor lamb!—as if it was fault of her'n." She gasped, choking back a sob.—"This'n's got em all on her side."

"That's all over now, Ruth," said Mrs. Trupp gently.

"I pray so, with all my heart I do," answered Ruth. "You never knaw. Seems to me some things are never over—not in this world anyways."

She blinked back tears, drew her hand across her eyes, and flashed up bravely.

"Silly, ain't it?" she laughed. "Only times it all come back so—what we went through, she and me. And not through any fault of mine—only foolishness like."

Ruth was one of those women who are a standing vindication of our civilisation and a challenge to all who indict it. She was up and about in an incredibly short time, the firmer in body and soul for her adventure.

One morning Alf came round quietly to see her. She was at the wash-tub, busy and bare-armed; and met him with eyes that were neither fearful nor defiant.

"I'm not a-goin to hurt you, Ruth," he began caressingly, with a characteristic lift of his chin. "I only come to say it's all right. You got nothink against me now and I'll forget all I know about you. A bargain's a bargain. And now you've done your bit I'll do mine."

The announcement, so generous in its intention, did not seem to make the expected impression.

"I am a gentleman," continued Alf, leaning against the door-post. "Always ave been. It's in me blood, see? Can't help meself like even if I was to wish to." He started off on a favourite theme of his. "Lord Ravensrood—him that made that speech on the Territorials the other night in the House of Lords, he's my second cousin. I daresay if enough was to die I'd be Lord Ravensrood meself. Often whiles I remember that. I'm not like the rest of them. I got blue blood running through me veins, as Reverend Spink says. You can tell that by the look of me. I'm not the one to take advantage."

Ruth, up to her elbows in soap-suds, lifted her face.

"I'm not afraid o you, Alf," she said quite simply. "Now I got my Ern."

The announcement annoyed Alf. He rolled his head resentfully.

"No one as does right has anythink to fear from me," he said harshly. "It's only wrong-doers I'm a terror to. Don't you believe what they tell you. So long as you keep yourself accordin and don't interfere with nobody, nobody won't interfere with you, my gurl."

Ruth mocked him daintily.

"I'm not your girl," she said, soaping her beautifully moulded arms. "I'm Ern's girl, and proud of it." Her lovely eyes engaged his, teasing and tempting. "That's our room above—his and mine. It's cosy."

"Ah," said Alf, smouldering. "I'd like to see it."

"You can't do that," answered Ruth gravely. "Besides, there's nothing to see only the double-bed Mrs. Trupp gave us and the curtains to close it at night and that, so that no one shan't peep at what they should'nt."

The touch of southern blood, wild and adventurous, which revealed itself in her swarthy colouring and black hair, stung her on to darings demure as they were provocative. Alf, sour of eye, changed the subject.

"Yes, it's a nice little bit of a crib," he said, glancing round. "What might be your rent?"

"More'n it ought to be," answered Ruth.

"That's a pity," said Alf. "What's Ern's money now?"

"I shan't tell you."

Alf thrust his huge head forward with an evil grin.

"I'll tell you," he said. "It's twenty-four, and that's the limit. Pigott won't raise him no more. I know Pigott." He gloated over his victim. "Yes, old Ern makes in the week what I'd make in a day if I was to do nothink only loll against the wall with me mouth open to catch the interest on me money that'd roll into it. And I'm makin all the time: for God's give me brains and I'm usin em. I'm not a-going to drive for somebody else all my life. I'm the comin man in this town—you ask my bankers. There's plenty doin you don't know nothin of, and more to come. And I'm at the back of it!—I'm the man what makes things move—that's what I am!" He swelled like a little bull-frog. "I'm a gentleman—that's Alf." He shot his face forward and wagged a finger at her. "And that's just the difference between Ern and me. I'm in the position to live on me own money and never do a hand's turn for it: while Ern has to sweat for his handful of coppers. And then it ain't enough to keep his wife from the wash-tub. I'd like to see my wife at that!—Now then!" He folded his arms and struck an attitude.

Ruth soused and wrung and rinsed quite unmoved.

"That aren't the only difference, Alf," she said soothingly. "See, Ern's got me. That makes up to him a lot, he says. He says he don't care nothing so long as he's got me to issalf, he says.... Strawberries and cream and plenty of em, he calls me when he's got the curtains draw'd up there, and me a-settin on his knee."

Alf retreated, burning and baffled. She came to the door drying her arms, and pursued her victim with eyes in which the lightning played with laughter; as fastidious and dainty in her cruelty as a cat sporting with a mouse.

A little way down the street he paused and turned. Then he came back a pace or two stealthily. His face was mottled and he was tilting his chin, mysterious and confidential.

"Never hear e'er a word from the Captain?" he asked, in a hushed voice.

Ruth flashed a terrible white and her bosom surged.

"I do times," continued the tormentor, and bustled on his way with a malignant chuckle.

CHAPTER V
THE CREEPING DEATH

One evening at the club, Mr. Trupp asked the Colonel what had happened to Captain Royal.

"He went through the Staff College, and now he's at the War Office, I believe," the other answered curtly.

"Ever hear from him?" asked Mr. Trupp, warily.

"No," said the Colonel. "He's not a friend of mine." And to save himself and an old brother-officer for whom he had neither liking nor respect, he changed the conversation to the theme that haunted him.

Mr. Trupp might chaff the Colonel about his idée fixe, but he, too, like most men of his class, had the fear of Germany constantly before his eyes and liked nothing better than to discuss the familiar topic with his friend over a cigar.

"Well, how are we getting on?" he asked encouragingly.

"Not so bad," the Colonel answered through the smoke. "Haldane's sent for Haig from India."

"Who's Haig?" puffed the other.

"Haig's a soldier who was at Oxford," the Colonel answered. "You didn't know there was such a variety, did you?"

"Never mind about Oxford," grunted the great surgeon. "Oxford turns out as many asses as any other institution so far as I can see. Does he know his job? That's the point."

"As well as you can expect a soldier to know it," replied the other, still in the ironic vein. "Sound but slow's his reputation. He and Haldane are the strongest combination there's been at the War Office in my time." He added more seriously—"They ought to get a move on between 'em, if anybody can."

"In time?" asked Mr. Trupp.

The Colonel, in spite of the recurrent waves of despair, which inundated him, was at heart an unrepentant optimist.

"I don't see why not," he said. "Bobs says Germany can't strike till the Kiel Canal's open for battleships. That won't be till 1912 or so."

The old doctor moved into the card-room with a cough.

"Gives you time to get on with your job, too, Colonel," he said. "I wish you well. Good-night."

The Colonel was retired now; but his brain was as active as ever, his heart as big, if his body was no longer so sure an instrument as it once had been. And Lord Roberts, when he asked his old comrade in arms to undertake work which he did not hesitate to describe as vital to the Empire, knew that the man to whom he was appealing possessed in excelsis the quality which has always made the British Army the nursery of spirits who put the good of the Service before their own advancement. The little old hero, like all great soldiers, had his favourite regiments, the result of association and experience; and it was well known that the Hammer-men stood at the top of the list. Fifty years before the date of this story they had sweated with him on the Ridge before Delhi; under his eyes had stormed the Kashmir Gate; with him had watched Nicholson die. Twenty years later they had gone up the Kurrum with the young Major-General, and made with him the famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Another twenty years and they were making the pace for the old Field Marshal in the great trek from Paardeberg to Bloemfontein. He knew most of the officers, some of them intimately. And on hearing that Jocko Lewknor had settled down at Beachbourne wrote at once and asked him to become Secretary of the local branch of the National Service League, which existed to establish in England universal military training on the lines of Switzerland's Militia.

The Colonel made one of his rare trips to London and lunched at the Rag with the leader who had been his hero ever since as a lad he had gone up the Peiwar Khotal with the First Hammer-men at the order of Bahadur Bobs.

The Field Marshal opened the Colonel's eyes to the danger threatening the Empire.

"The one thing in our favour is this," he said, as they parted at the hall-door. "We've yet time."

The Colonel, inspired with new life, returned to Beachbourne and told his wife. She listened with vivid interest.

"You've got your work cut out, my Jocko," she said. "And I shan't be able to help you much."

"No," replied the Colonel. "You must stick to the hostel. I'll plough my own furrow."

Forthwith he set to work with the quiet tenacity peculiar to him. From the start he made surprising headway, perhaps because he was so unlike the orthodox product of the barrack-square; and like his leader he eschewed the party politics he had always loathed.

When he took up the work of the League he found it one of the many non-party organisations, run solely by the Conservatives quartered in Meads and Old Town, because, to do them justice, nobody else would lend a hand. Liberalism, camped in mid-town about Terminus Road, was sullenly suspicious; Labour, at the East-end, openly hostile. The opposition of Liberalism, the Colonel soon discovered, centred round the leader of Nonconformity in the town, Mr. Geddes, the powerful Presbyterian minister at St. Andrew's; the resistance of Labour, inchoate as yet and ineffective as the Labour Party from which it sprang, was far more difficult to tackle as being more vague and imponderable.

In those days, always with the same end in view, the Colonel spent much time in the East-end, winding his way into the heart of Industrial Democracy. He sloughed some old prejudices and learnt some new truths, especially the one most difficult for a man of his age and tradition to imbibe—that he knew almost nothing of modern England. Often on Sundays he would walk across from Meads to Sea-gate and spend his afternoon wandering in the Recreation Ground, gathering impressions on the day that Labour tries to become articulate.

On one such Sunday afternoon he came on a large old gentleman in gold spectacles, fair linen, and roomy tailcoat, meandering on the edge of a dirty and tattered crowd who were eddying about a platform. The old gentleman seemed strangely out of place and delightfully unconscious of it; wandering about, large, benevolent and undisturbed, like a moon in a stormy sky.

"Well, Mr. Caspar," said the Colonel quietly. "What do you make of it all?"

The large soft man turned his mild gaze of a cow in calf on the lean tall one at his side. It was clear he had no notion who the speaker was; or that they had been at Trinity together forty years before.

"To me it's extraordinarily inspiring," he said with an earnestness that was almost ridiculous. "I feel the surge of the spirit beating behind the bars down here as I do nowhere else.... It fills me with an immense hope."

The Colonel, standing by the other like a stick beside a sack, sighed.

"They fill me with a fathomless despair," he said gently. "One wants to help them, but they won't let you."

The other shook a slow head.

"I don't look at it like that," he replied. "I go to them for help."

The Colonel made a little moue.

"D'you get it?" he asked

"I do," Mr. Caspar replied with startling conviction.

The Colonel moved sorrowfully upon his way. He was becoming a man of one idea—Germany....

A few nights later, after supper, he strolled up Beau-nez under a harvest-moon spreading silvery wings moth-like over earth and sea. He was full of his own thoughts, and and for once heavy, almost down-hearted, as he took up his familiar post of vigil beside the flagstaff on the Head and looked out over the shining waters. The Liberals were moving at last, it seemed. The great cry for Dreadnoughts, more Dreadnoughts,

We want eight!
We won't wait!

had gone up to the ears of Government from millions of middle-class homes; but the Working Man still slept.

Would nothing rouse him to the Terror that stalked by night across those quiet waters? ... The Working Man, who would have to bear the brunt of it when the trouble came.... The Working Man...?

The Head was deserted save for the familiar goat tethered outside the coast-guard station. The moon beamed down benignantly on the silver-sabled land, broad-bosomed about him, and the waters stirring far beneath him with a rustle like wind in corn. Then he heard a movement at his back, and turned to see behind him, shabby, collarless, sheepish, the very Working Man of whom he had been thinking.

The Colonel regarded the mystic figure, gigantic in the moonlight, a type rather than an individual, with an interest that was half compassionate and half satirical.

Yes. That was the feller! That was the chap who would take it in the neck! That man with the silly smile—God help him!

"Come to look for it?" he said to the shadow, half to himself—"wiser than your kind?"

"Look for what, sir?"

"The Creeping Death that's stealing across the sea to swallow you and yours."

The shadow sidled towards him.

"Is that you, sir?" a voice said. "I thought it were."

The Colonel emerged from his dream.

"What, Caspar!" he replied. "What are you doing up here at this time of night?"

"Just come up for a look round before turning in, me and my wife, sir," the other answered. "Ruth," he called, "it's the Colonel."

A young woman with an orange scarf about her hair issued from the shadow of the coast-guard station and came forward slowly.

"I've heard a lot about you from Ern, sir," she said in a deep voice that hummed like a top in the silvery silence. "When you commanded his battalion in India and all."

The Colonel, standing in the dusk, listened with a deep content as to familiar music, the player unseen; and was aware that his senses were stirred by a beauty felt rather than seen...... Then he dropped down the hill to the hostel twinkling solitary in the coombe beneath.

"Your friend Caspar's married," he told his wife on joining her in the loggia. The little lady scoffed.

"Married!" she cried. "He's been married nearly a year. They spent their honeymoon on the hill at the back last autumn. I could see them from my room."

"Why ever didn't you tell me?" asked the Colonel. "I'd have run em in for vagrancy."

"No, you wouldn't," answered Mrs. Lewknor.

"Why not?"

"Because, my Jocko, she's a peasant Madonna. You couldn't stand up against her. No man could."

"A powerful great creature from what I could see of her," the Colonel admitted. "A bit of a handful for Master Ernie, I should guess."

Mrs. Lewknor's fine face became firm. She thought she scented a challenge in the words and dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in them.

"Ernie'll hold her," she said. "He could hold any woman. He's a gentleman like his father before him."

He reached a long arm across to her as he sat and raised her fingers to his lips.

Years ago a bird had flashed across the vision of his wife, coming and going, in and out of the darkness, like the sparrow of the Saxon tale; but this had been no sparrow, rather a bird of Paradise. The Colonel knew that; and he knew that the fowler who had loosed the jewel-like bird was that baggy old gentleman who lived across the golf links in the little house that overlooked the Rectory. He knew and understood: for years ago the same bird had flashed with radiant wings across the chamber of his life too, swiftly coming, swiftly going.

CHAPTER VI
THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET

If the Colonel in his missionary efforts for the National Service League made little impression on the masses in the East-end, he was astonishingly successful with such labour as existed in Old Town; which in political consciousness lagged fifty years behind its tumultuous neighbour on the edge of the Levels, and retained far into this century much of the atmosphere of a country village. There the Church was still a power politically, and the workers disorganised. The Brewery in the Moot and the Southdown Transport Company were the sole employers of labour in the bulk; and Mr. Pigott the only stubborn opponent of the programme of the League.

Archdeacon Willcocks backed the Colonel with whole-hearted ferocity, and lent him the services of the Reverend Spink, who, flattered at working with a Colonel D.S.O., showed himself keen and capable, and proposed to run the Old Town branch of the League in conjunction with the Church of England's Men's Society.

"I've got a first-rate secretary as a start," he told the Colonel importantly.

"Who's that?"

"Caspar."

"Ernest Caspar!" cried the Colonel. "The old Hammer-man!"

"No, his brother. Twice the man. Alfred—Mr. Trupp's chauffeur."

A few days later, when leaving the curate's lodgings, the Colonel ran up against Ernie in Church Street.

"Your brother's joined us," he said. "Are you going to?"

Ernie's charming face became sullen at once.

"I would, sir," he said. "Only for that."

"Only for what?"

"Alf."

"You won't join because your brother has!" grinned the Colonel.

Ernie rolled a sheepish head.

"It's my wife, sir," he muttered. "See, he persecutes her somethink shameful."

Next afternoon the Colonel was crossing Saffrons Croft on his way to the Manor-house for tea, when a majestic young woman, a baby in her arms, sauntering under the elms watching the cricket, smiled at him suddenly.

He stopped, uncertain of her identity.

"I'm Mrs. Caspar, sir," she explained. "We met you the other night on the Head—Ern and me."

"Oh, I know all about you!" replied the Colonel, glancing at the baby who lifted to the sky a face like a sleeping rose. "My word!—she's a bonny un."

"She grows, sir," replied Ruth, cooing and contented. "We gets her all the air we can. So we come here with the children for a blow of the coolth most in general Saraday afternoons. More air than in the Moot."

"Where's Caspar?" asked the Colonel.

"Yonder under the ellums, sir, along with a friend. Come about the classes or something I did hear."

"The class-war?" asked the Colonel grimly.

"No, sir," answered Ruth. "Classes for learning you learning, I allow. Man from the North, I yeard say. Talks funny—foreign talk I call it."

Just then the Colonel's glance fell on a child, slim as a daisy stalk, and with the healthy pallor of a wood-anemone, hiding behind Ruth's skirt and peeping at the stranger with fearless blue eyes that seemed somehow strangely familiar.

"And what's your name, little Miss Hide-away?" he asked, delighted.

"Little Alice," the child replied, bold and delicate as a robin.

The fact that the child was obviously some four years old while Ernie had not been married half that time did not occur to the Colonel as strange. He glanced at the young mother, noble in outline, and in her black and red beauty of the South so unlike the child.

"She doesn't take after her mother and father," he said, with the reckless indiscretion of his sex.

Then he saw his mistake. Ruth has run up signals of distress. Ernie, who had now joined them, as always at his best in an emergency, came quickly to the rescue.

"Favours her grandmother, sir, I say," he remarked.

"Like my boy," commented the Colonel, recovering himself. "I don't think anybody'd have taken our Jock for his father's son when he joined us at Pindi in 1904—eh, Caspar?"

The two old Hammer-men chatted over days in India. Then the Colonel went on up the hill, the eyes of the child still haunting him.

The Manor-house party were having tea on the lawn, under the laburnum, looking over the sunk fence on to Saffrons Croft beyond, when the Colonel joined them. Mrs. Lewknor was already there; and young Stanley Bessemere, the Conservative candidate for Beachbourne East. He and Bess were watching a little group of people gathered about a man who was standing on a bench in Saffrons Croft haranguing.

"Lend me your bird-glasses, Miss Trupp," said her companion eagerly.

He stood up, a fine figure of a man, perfectly tailored,

"Yes," he said. "I thought so. It's my friend."

"Who's that?" asked the Colonel.

"Our bright particular local star of Socialism," the other answered. "The very latest thing from Ruskin College. I thought he confined himself to the East-end, but I'm glad to find he gives you Old Towners a turn now and then, Miss Trupp. And I hope he won't forget you up at Meads, Colonel."

"What's his name?" asked Bess, amused.

"Burt," replied the other. "He comes from the North—and he's welcome to go back there to-morrow so far as I'm concerned."

"You're from the North yourself, Mr. Bessemere," Mrs. Trupp reminded him.

"I am," replied the young man, "and proud of it. But for political purposes, I prefer the South. That's why I'm a candidate for Beachbourne East."

A few minutes later he took his departure. The Colonel watched him go with a sardonic grin. Philosopher though he might be, he was not above certain of the prejudices common to his profession, and possessed in an almost exaggerated degree the Army view of all politicians as the enemies of Man at large and of the Services in particular.

Bess was still observing through her glasses the little group about the man on the bench.

"There's Ruth!" she cried—"and Ernie!"

"Listening to the orator?" asked the Colonel, joining her.

"Not Ruth!" answered Bess with splendid scorn. "No orators for her, thank you!—She's listening to the baby. Ernie can listen to him."

The Colonel took the glasses and saw Ruth and Ernie detach themselves from the knot of people and come slowly up the hill making for Borough Lane.

"That really is a magnificent young woman of Caspar's," he said to his host.

"She's one in a million," replied the old surgeon.

"William's always been in love with her," said his wife.

"All the men are," added Mrs. Lewknor, with a provocative little nod at her husband.

"Where did he pick up his pearl?" asked the Colonel. "I love that droning accent of hers. It's like the music of a rookery."

"She can ca-a-a away with the best of them when she likes," chuckled Bess. "You should hear her over the baby!"

"An Aldwolston girl," said Mrs. Trupp. "She's Sussex to the core—with that Spanish strain so many of them have." She added with extreme deliberation,—"She was at the Hohenzollern for a bit one time o day, as we say in these parts."

Mrs. Lewknor coloured faintly and looked at her feet. Next to her Jocko and his Jock the regiment was the most sacred object in her world. But the harm was done. The secret she had guarded so long even from her husband was out. The word Hohenzollern had, she saw, unlocked the door of the mystery for him.

Instantly the Colonel recalled Captain Royal's stay at the hotel on the Crumbles a few years before ... Ernie Caspar's service there ... the clash of the two men on the steps of the house where he was now having tea ... Royal's sudden flight, and the rumours that had reached him of the reasons for it.

The eyes which had looked at him a few minutes since in Saffrons Croft from beneath the fair brow of little Alice were the eyes of his old adjutant.

Then Mr. Trupp's voice broke in upon his reverie.

"Ah," said the old surgeon, "I see you know."

"And I'm glad you should," remarked Mrs. Trupp with the almost vindictive emphasis that at times characterised this so gentle woman.

"Everybody does, mother," Bess interjected quietly...

As the Colonel and his wife walked home across the golf links he turned to her.

"Did you know that, Rachel?" he inquired.

She looked straight in front of her as she walked.

"I did, my Jocko ... Mrs. Trupp told me."

The Colonel mused.

"What a change!—from Royal to Caspar!" he said.

She glanced up at him.

"You don't understand, Jocko," she said quietly. "Ruth was never Royal's mistress. She was a maid on the Third Floor at the Hohenzollern when he was there. He simply raped her and bolted."

The Colonel shrugged.

"Like the cad," he said.

They walked on awhile. Then the Colonel said more to himself than to his companion,

"I wonder if she's satisfied?"

The little lady at his side made a grimace that suggested—"Is any woman?"

But all she said was,

"She's a good woman."

"She's come a cropper once," replied the Colonel.

"She was tripped," retorted the other almost tartly. "She didn't fall."

CHAPTER VII
THE MAN FROM THE NORTH

A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, the Colonel was sitting in the loggia of the hostel looking out over the sea when he saw two men coming down the shoulder of Beau-nez along the coast-guard path.

The tall man in black with flying coat-tails he recognised at once. It was Mr. Geddes, the one outstanding minister of the Gospel in Beachbourne: a scholar, yet in touch with his own times, eloquent and broad, with a more than local reputation as a Liberal leader. His companion was a sturdy fellow in a cap, with curly black hair and a merry eye.

The Colonel, who never missed a chance, went out to waylay the pair. Mr. Geddes introduced his friend—Mr. Burt, who'd come down recently from Mather and Platt's in the North to act as foreman fitter at Hewson and Clarke's in the East-end.

The Colonel reached out a bony hand, which the other gripped fiercely.

"I know you're both conspirators," he said with a wary smile. "What troubles are you hatching for me now?"

Mr. Geddes laughed, and the engineer, surly a little from shyness and self-conscious as a school-boy, grinned.

"Mr. Burt and I are both keen on education," said the minister. "He's been telling me of Tawney's tutorial class at Rochdale. We're hatching a branch of the W.E.A. down here. That's our only conspiracy."

"What's the W.E.A.?" asked the Colonel, always keen.

"It's the Democratic wing of the National Service League," the engineer answered in broad Lancashire—"Workers' Education Association."

The Colonel nodded.

"He's getting at me!" he said. "I'm always being shot at. Will you both come in to tea and talk?—I should like you to meet my wife, Burt. She'll take you on. She's a red-hot Tory and a bonnie fighter."

But Mr. Geddes had a committee, and—"A must get on with the Revolution," said Burt gravely.

"What Revolution's that?" asked the Colonel.

"The Revolution that begun in 1906—and that's been going on ever since; and will go on till we're through!" He said the last words with a kind of ferocity; and then burst into a sudden jovial roar as he saw the humour of his own ultra-seriousness.

Mrs. Lewknor, who had been watching the interview from the loggia, called to her husband as he returned to the house.

"Who was that man with Mr. Geddes?" she asked.

"Stanley Bessemere's friend," the Colonel answered. "A red Revolutionary from Lancasheer—on the bubble; and a capital good fellow too, I should say."

That evening the Colonel rang up Mr. Geddes to ask about the engineer.

"He's the new type of intellectual artizan," the minister informed him. "The russet-coated captain who knows what he's fighting for and loves what he knows. Unless I'm mistaken he's going to play a considerable part in our East-end politics down here." He gave the other the engineer's address, adding with characteristic breadth,

"It might be worth your while to follow him up perhaps, Colonel."

Joe Burt lodged in the East-end off Pevensey Road in the heart of the new and ever-growing industrial quarter of Seagate, which was gradually transforming a rather suburban little town of villas with a fishing-station attached into a manufacturing city, oppressed with all the thronging problems of our century. There the Colonel visited his new friend. Burt was the first man of his type the old soldier, who had done most of his service in India, had met. The engineer himself, and even more the room in which he lived, with its obvious air of culture, was an eye-opener to the Colonel.

There was an old sideboard, beautifully kept, and on it a copper kettle and spirit lamp; a good carpet, decent curtains. On the walls were Millais's Knight Errant, Greiffenhagen's Man with a Scythe, and Clausen's Girl at the Gate. But it was the books on a long deal plank that most amazed the old soldier; not so much the number of them but the quality. He stood in front of them and read their titles with grunts.

Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics lolled up against the Webbs' Industrial Democracy; Bradley's lectures on the tragedies of Shakespeare hobnobbed with Gilbert Murray's translations from Euripides. Few of the standard books on Economics and Industrial History, English or American, were missing. And the work of the modern creators in imaginative literature, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett were mixed with Alton Locke, Daniel Deronda, Sybil, and the essays of Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter.

"You're not married then?" said the Colonel, throwing a glance round the well-appointed room.

"Yes, A am though," the engineer answered, his black-brown eyes twinkling. "A'm married to Democracy. She's ma first loov and like to be ma last."

"What you doing down South?" asked the Colonel, tossing one leg over the other as he sat down to smoke.

"Coom to make trouble," replied the other.

"Good for you!" said the Colonel. "Hotting things up for our friend Stan. Well, he wants it. All the politicians do."

His first visit to Seagate Lane was by no means his last: for the engineer's courage, his integrity, his aggressive tactics, delighted and amused the scholarly old soldier; but when he came to tackle his man seriously on the business of the National Service League he found he could not move him an inch from the position he invariably took up: The Army would be used by the Government in the only war that matters—the Industrial war; and therefore the Army must not be strengthened.

"If the Army was used for the only purpose it ought to be used for—defence—A'd be with you. So'd the boolk of the workers. But it's not. They use it to croosh strikes!" And he brought his fist down on the table with a characteristic thump. "That's to croosh us!—For the strike's our only weapon, Colonel."

The power, the earnestness, even the savagery he displayed, amazed the other. Here was a reality, an elemental force of which he had scarcely been aware. This was Democracy incarnate. And whatever else he might think he could not but admire the sincerity and strength of it. But he always brought his opponent back to what was for him the only issue.

"Germany!" he said.

"That's blooff!" replied the other. "They'll get the machine-guns for use against Germany, and when they've got em they'll use them against us. That's the capitalists' game.—Then there's the officers."

"What about em?" said the Colonel cheerfully. "They're harmless enough, poor devils."

"Tories to a man. Coom from the capitalist class."

"What if they do?"

"The Army does what the capitalist officer tells it. And he knows where his interest lies aw reet."

"Well, of course you know the British officer better than I do, Burt," replied the Colonel, nettled for once.

His opponent was grimly pleased to have drawn blood.

"In the next few years if things go as they look like goin we shall see," was his comment. "Wait till we get a Labour Government in power!"

The Colonel knocked out his pipe.

"Well, Burt, I'll say this," he remarked. "If we could get half the passion into our cause you do into yours, we should do."

"We're fighting a reality, Colonel," the other answered. "You're fighting a shadow, that's the difference."

"I hope to God it may prove so!" said the Colonel, as they shook hands.

The two men thoroughly enjoyed their spars. And the battle was well matched: for the soldier of the Old Army and the soldier of the New were both scholars, well-read, logical, and fair-minded.

On one of his visits the Colonel found Ernie Caspar in the engineer's room standing before the book-shelf, handling the books. Ernie showed himself a little shame-faced in the presence of his old Commanding Officer.

"How do they compare to your father's, Caspar?" asked the Colonel, innocently unaware of the other's mauvaise honte and the cause of it.

"Dad's got ne'er a book now, sir," Ernie answered gruffly. "Only just the Bible, and Wordsworth, and Troward's Lectures. Not as he'd ever anythink like this—only Carpenter. See, dad's not an economist. More of a philosopher and poet like."

"I wish they were mine," said the Colonel, turning over Zimmeni's Greek Commonwealth.

"They're all right if so be you can afford em," answered Ernie shortly, almost sourly.

"Books are better'n beer, Ernie," said Joe Burt, a thought maliciously; and added with the little touch of priggishness that is rarely absent from those who have acquired knowledge comparatively late in life—"They're the bread of life and source of power."

"Maybe," retorted Ernie with a snort; "but they aren't the equal of wife and children, I'll lay."

He left the room surlily.

Burt grinned at the Colonel.

"Ern's one o the much-married uns," he said.

"D'you know his wife?" the Colonel asked.

Joe shook his bull-head.

"Nay," he said. "And don't wish to."

"She's a fine woman all the same," replied the Colonel.

"Happen so," the other answered. "All the more reason a should avoid her. They canna thole me, the women canna. And A don't blame em."

"Why can't they thole you?" asked the Colonel curiously.

"Most Labour leaders rise to power at the expense of their wives," the other explained. "They go on; but the wives stay where they are—at the wash-tub. The women see that; and they don't like it. And they're right."

"What's the remedy?"

"There's nobbut one." Joe now not seldom honoured the Colonel by relapsing into dialect when addressing him. "And that's for the Labour leader to remain unmarried. They're the priests of Democracy—or should be."

"You'll never make a Labour leader out of Caspar," said the Colonel genially. "I've tried to make an N.C.O. of him before now and failed."

"A'm none so sure," Joe said, and added with genuine concern: "He's on the wobble. Might go up; might go down. Anything might happen to yon lad now. He's just the age. But he's one o ma best pupils—if he'll nobbut work."

"Ah," said the Colonel with interest. "So he's joined your class at St. Andrew's Hall, has he?"

"Yes," replied the other. "Mr. Chislehurst brought him along—the new curate in Old Town. D'ye know him?"

"He's my cousin," replied the Colonel. "I got him here. He'd been overworking in Bermondsey—in connection with the Oxford Bermondsey Mission."

"Oh, he's one of them!" cried the other. "That accounts for it. A know them. They were at Oxford when A was at Ruskin. They're jannock,—and so yoong with it. They think they're going to convert the Church to Christianity!" He chuckled.

"In the course of history," remarked the Colonel, "many Churchmen have thought that. But the end of it's always been the same."

"What's that?" asked the engineer.

"That the Church has converted them."

CHAPTER VIII
THE CHERUB

The advent of Bobby Chislehurst to Old Town made a considerable difference to Bessie Trupp. She was not at all in love with him and he only pleasantly so with her; but as she told her friend the Colonel,

"He's the first curate we've ever had in Old Town you can be like that with."

"Like that is good," said the Colonel. "Give me my tables. Meet it is I write it down.—It says nothing and expresses everything."

Now if the clergy in Old Town with the exception of Bess's pet antipathy, the Reverend Spink, were honest men worthy of respect, as everybody admitted, they were also old-fashioned; and Bobby Chislehurst was a new and disturbing element in their midst. Shy and unassuming though he was, the views of the Cherub, as the Colonel called his cousin, when they became known, created something of a mild sensation in the citadel which had been held for Conservatism against all comers by the Archdeacon and his lady for nearly forty years.

Even Mr. Pigott was shocked.

"He's a Socialist!" he confided to Mr. Trupp at the Bowling Green Committee.

The old Nonconformist had passed the happiest hours of a militant life in battle with the Church as represented by his neighbour, the Archdeacon, but of late it had been borne in upon him with increasing urgency that the time might come when Church and Chapel would have to join forces and present a common front against the hosts of Socialism which he feared more than ever he had done the Tory legions.

But if the Church was going Socialist! ...

And Mr. Chislehurst said it was...

The new curate and Bess Trupp had much in common, especially Boy Scouts, their youth and the outstanding characteristic of their generation—a passionate interest and sympathy for their poorer neighbours. Both spent laborious and happy hours in the Moot, listening a great deal, learning much, even helping a little. Bess, who had known most of the dwellers in the hollow under the Kneb all her life, had of course her favourites whom she commended to the special care of Bobby on his arrival; and first of these were the young Caspars.

She told him of Edward Caspar, her mother's old friend, scholar, dreamer, gentleman, with the blood of the Beauregards in his veins, who had married the daughter of an Ealing tobacconist, and lived in Rectory Walk; of Anne Caspar, the harsh and devoted tyrant; of the two sons of this inharmonious couple, and the antagonism between them from childhood; of Alf's victory and Ernie's enlistment in the Army; his sojourn in India and return to Old Town some years since; and she gave him a brief outline of Ruth's history, not mentioning Royal's name but referring once or twice through set teeth to "that little beast."

"Who's that?" asked the Cherub.

"Ernie's brother," she answered. "Alfred, who drives for dad."

"Not the sidesman?"

"Yes."

Bobby looked surprised.

"Mr. Spink," Bess explained darkly. "He got him there."

Apart from Bess's recommendation, Mr. Chislehurst's contact with Ruth was soon established through little Alice, who attended Sunday School. Ruth, moreover, called herself a church-woman, and was sedately proud of it, though the Church had no apparent influence upon her life, and though she never attended services.

On the latter point, the Cherub, when he had rooted himself firmly in her regard, remonstrated.

"See, I ca-a-n't, sir," said Ruth simply.

"Why not?" asked Bobby.

"He's always there," Ruth answered enigmatically.

Bobby was puzzled and she saw it.

"Alf," she explained. "See, he wanted me same as Ernie. Only not to marry me. Just for his fun like and then throw you over. That's Alf, that is. There's the difference atween the two brothers." She regarded the young man before her with the lovely solicitude of the mother initiating a sensitive son into the cruelties of a world of which she has already had tragic experience. "Men are like that, sir—some men." She added with tender delicacy, "Only you wouldn't know it, not yet."

The Cherub might be innocent, but no man has lived and worked in the back-streets of Bermondsey without learning some strange and ugly truths about life and human nature.

"He's not worrying you now?" he asked anxiously.

"Nothing to talk on," answered Ruth. "He wants me still, I allow. Only he won't get me—not yet a bit anyways." She seemed quite casual about the danger that threatened her, Bobby noticed; even, he thought, quietly enjoying it.

That evening, when the Cherub touched on the point to his colleague, Mr. Spink turned in his india-rubber lips.

"It's an honour to be abused by a woman like that," he said. "She's a bad character—bad."

"She's not that, I swear!" cried Bobby warmly. "She may have exaggerated, or made a mistake, but bad she's not."

"I believe I've been in the parish longer than you have, Chislehurst," retorted the other crisply. "And presumably I know something about the people in it."

"You've not been in as long as Miss Trupp," retorted Bobby. "She's been here all her life."

Mr. Spink puffed at his cigar with uplifted chin and smiled.

"How's it getting on?" he asked.

"Pah!" muttered Bobby—"Cad!" and went out, rather white.

That was not the end of the matter, however.

A few days later Joe Burt and Bobby had paused for a word at the Star corner when Mr. Spink and Alf Caspar came down Church Street together.

"Birds of a feather," said Alf loudly, nudging his companion, just as they passed the standing couple.

"That's not very courteous, Caspar," called Bobby quietly after him.

Mr. Spink walked on with a smirk; but Alf came back with hardly dissimulated truculence.

"Sorry you've been spreading this about me, Mr. Chislehurst," he said, his sour eyes blinking.

"What?" asked the Cherub, astonished.

"Dirt," Alf retorted. "And I know where you got it from too."

"I haven't," cried Bobby with boyish indignation. "What d'you mean?"

"I know you have though," retorted Alf. "So it's no good denying it." He was about to move on with a sneer when Joe Burt struck in.

"That's a foonny way to talk," he said.

"Foonny it may be," mocked Alf. "One thing I'll lay: it's not so foonny as your lingo."

The engineer shouldered a pace nearer.

"Throw a sneer, do you?"

"Ah," said Alf, secure in the presence of the clergyman. "I know all about you."

"Coom to that," retorted the Northerner, "I know a little about you. One o Stan's pups, aren't you?"

Bobby moved on and Alf at once followed suit.

"You keep down in the East-end, my lad!" he called over his shoulder. "We don't want none of it in Old Town. Nor we won't have it, neether."

Joe stood four-square at the cross-roads, bristling like a dog.

"Called yourself a Socialist when yo were down, didn't you?" he shouted. "And then turned Church and State when yo began to make. I know your sort!"

He dropped down Borough Lane, hackles still up, on the way to meet Ernie by appointment in the Moot.

At the corner he waited, one eye on Ern's cottage, which he did not approach. Then Ruth's face peeped round her door, amused and malicious, to catch his dark head bobbing back into covert as he saw her. The two played I spy thus most evenings to the amusement of one of them at least.

"He's there," she told Ernie in the kitchen—"Waitin at the corner.—Keeps a safe distance, don't he?—What's he feared on?"

"You," answered Ernie, and rose.

Ruth snorted. The reluctance to meet her of this man with the growing reputation as a fighter amused and provoked her. Sometimes she chaffed with Ernie about it; but a ripple of resentment ran always across her laughter.

Ern now excused his friend.

"He's all for his politics," he said. "No time for women."

"Hap, he'll learn yet," answered Ruth with a fierce little nod of her head.

CHAPTER IX
THE SHADOW OF ROYAL

That evening Alf called at Bobby's lodgings and apologised frankly.

"I know I said what I shouldn't, sir," he admitted. "But it fairly tortured me to see you along of a chap like that Burt."

"He's all right," said Bobby coldly.

Alf smiled that sickly smile of his.

"Ah, you're innocent, Mr. Chislehurst," he said. "Only wish I knew as little as you do."

Alf in fact was moving on and up again in his career; walking warily in consequence, and determined to do nothing that should endanger his position with the powers that be. This was the motive that inspired his apology to Mr. Chislehurst and caused him likewise to make approaches to his old schoolmaster, Mr. Pigott.

The old Nonconformist met the advances of his erstwhile pupil with genial brutality.

"What's up now, Alf?" he asked. "Spreading the treacle to catch the flies. Mind ye don't catch an hornet instead then!"

The remark may have been made in innocence, but Alf looked sharply at the speaker and retired in some disorder. His new stir of secret busyness was in fact bringing him into contact with unusual company, as Mrs. Trupp discovered by accident. One evening she had occasion to telephone on behalf of her husband to the garage. A voice that seemed familiar replied.

"Who's that?" she asked.

The answer came back, sharp as an echo,

"Who's that?"

"I'm Mrs. Trupp. I want to speak to Alfred Caspar."

Then the voice muttered and Alfred took the receiver.

Later Mrs. Trupp told her husband of the incident.

"I'm certain it was Captain Royal," she said with emphasis.

The old surgeon expressed no surprise.

"I daresay," he said. "Alf's raising money for some business scheme. He told me so."

Now if Alf's attempts on Ruth in the days between the birth of the child and her marriage to Ernie were known to Mrs. Trupp, the connection of the little motor-engineer and Royal was only suspected by her. A chance word of Ruth's had put her on guard; and that was all. Now with the swift natural intuition for the ways of evil-doers, which the innocent woman, once roused, so often reveals as by miracle, she flashed to a conclusion.

"Alf's blackmailing him!" she said positively.

"I shouldn't be surprised," her husband answered calmly.

His wife put her hand upon his shoulder.

"How can you employ a man like that, William?" she said, grave and grieved.

It was an old point of dispute between them. Now he took her hand and stroked it.

"My dear," he said, "when a bacteriologist has had a unique specimen under the microscope for years he's not going to abandon it for a scruple."

A few days later Mrs. Trupp was walking down Borough Lane past the Star when she saw Alf and Ruth cross each other on the pavement fifty yards in front. Neither stopped, but Alf shot a sidelong word in the woman's ear as he slid by serpent-wise. Ruth marched on with a toss of her head, and Mrs. Trupp noted the furtive look in the eyes of her husband's chaffeur as he met her glance and passed, touching his cap.

Mindful of her conversation with her husband, she followed Ruth home and boarded her instantly.

"Ruth," she asked, "I want to know something. You must tell me for your own good. Alfred's got no hold over you?"

Ruth drew in her breath with the sound, almost a hiss, of a sword snatched from its scabbard. Then slowly she relaxed.

"He's not got the sway over me not now," she said in a still voice, with lowered eyes. "Only thing he's the only one outside who knaws Captain Royal's the father of little Alice."

Mrs. Trupp eyed her under level brows.

"Oh, he does know that?" she said.

Ruth was pale.

"Yes, 'M," she said. "See Alf used to drive him that summer at the Hohenzollern."

Mrs. Trupp was not entirely satisfied.

"I don't see how Alfred can hold his knowledge over you," she remarked.

"Not over me," answered Ruth, raising her eyes. "Over him."

"Over who?"

"Captain Royal," said Ruth; and added slowly—"And I'd be sorry for anyone Alf got into his clutches—let alone her father."

Her dark eyes smouldered; her colour returned to her, swarthy and glowing; a gleam of teeth revealed itself between faintly parted lips.

Mrs. Trupp not for the first time was aware of a secret love of battle and danger in this young Englishwoman whose staid veins carried the wild blood of some remote ancestress who had danced in the orange groves of Seville, watched the Mediterranean blue flecked with the sails of Barbary corsairs, and followed with passionate eyes the darings and devilries of her matador in the ring among the bulls of Andalusia.

Mrs. Trupp returned home, unquiet at heart, and with a sense that somehow she had been baffled. She knew Ruth well enough now to understand how that young woman had fallen a prey to Royal. It was not the element of class that had been her undoing, certainly not the factor of money: it was the soldier in the man who had seized the girl's imagination. And Mrs. Trupp, daughter herself of a line of famous soldiers, recognised that Royal with all his faults, was a soldier, fine as a steel-blade, keen, thorough, searching. It was the hardness and sparkle and frost-like quality of this man with a soul like a sword which had set dancing the girl's hot Spanish blood. Royal was a warrior; and to that fact Ruth owned her downfall.

Was Ernie a warrior too?

Not for the first time she asked herself the question as she turned out of the Moot into Borough Lane. And at the moment the man of whom she was thinking emerged from the yard of the Transport Company, dusty, draggled, negligent as always, and smiling at her with kind eyes—too kind, she sometimes thought.

As she crossed the road to the Manor-house Joe Burt passed her and gave his cap a surly hitch by way of salute. Mrs. Trupp responded pleasantly. Her husband, she knew, respected the engineer. She herself had once heard him speak and had admired the fire and fearlessness in him. Moreover, genuine aristocrat that she was, she followed with sympathy his lonely battle against the hosts of Toryism in the East-end, none the less because she was herself a Conservative by tradition and temperament.

That man was a warrior to be sure....

That evening the old surgeon dropped his paper and looked over his pince-nez at his wife and daughter.

"My dears," he said, "I've some good news for you."

"I know," replied Bess, scornfully. "Your Lloyd George is coming down in January to speak on his iniquitous Budget. I knew that, thank you!"

"Better even than that," her father answered. "Alfred Caspar's leaving me of his own accord."

The girl tossed her skein of coloured silk to the ceiling with a splendid gesture.

"Chuck-her-up!" she cried. "Do you hear, mother?"

"I do," answered Mrs. Trupp severely. "Better late than never."

"And I'm losing the best chauffeur in East Sussex," Mr. Trupp continued.

Alf, indeed, who had paddled his little canoe for so long and so successfully on the Beachbourne mill-pond, was now about to launch a larger vessel on the ocean of the world in obedience to the urge of that ambition which, apart from a solitary lapse, had been the consuming passion of his life. Unlike most men, however, who, as they become increasingly absorbed in their own affairs, tend to drop outside interests, he persisted loyally in old-time activities. Whether it was that his insatiable desire for power forbade him to abandon any position, however modest, which afforded him scope; or that he felt it more necessary than ever now, in the interests of his expanding career, to maintain and if possible improve his relations with the Church and State which exercised so potent a control in the sphere in which he proposed to operate; or that the genuinely honest workman in him refused to abandon a job to which he had once put his hand, it is the fact that he continued diligent in his office at St. Michael's, and manifested even increased zeal in his labours for the National Service League.

Alf, indeed, so distinguished himself by his services to the League that at the annual meeting at the Town Hall, he received public commendation both from the Archdeacon and the Colonel, who announced that "the admirable and indefatigable secretary of our Old Town branch, Mr. Alfred Caspar, has agreed to become District Convener."

That meeting was a red-letter day in the history of the Beachbourne National Service League, for at it the Colonel disclosed that Lord Roberts was coming down to speak.

CHAPTER X
BOBS

The old Field-Marshal, wise and anxious as a great doctor, was sitting now at the bedside of the patient that was his country. His finger was on her pulse, his eye on the hourglass, the sands of which were running out; and he was listening always for the padding feet of that Visitor whose knock on the door he expected momentarily.

After South Africa he had sheathed at last the sword which had not rested in its scabbard for fifty years; and from that moment his eyes were everywhere, watching, guiding, cherishing the movement to which he had given birth.

He followed the activities and successes of Colonel Lewknor on the South Coast with a close attention of which the old Hammer-man knew nothing; and to show his appreciation of the Colonel's labours, he volunteered to come down to Beachbourne and address a meeting.

The offer was greedily accepted.

Mrs. Lewknor, who, now that the hostel was in full swing, was more free to interest herself in her husband's concerns, flung herself into the project with enthusiasm. And the Colonel went to work with tact and resolution. On one point he was determined: this should not be a Conservative demonstration, run by the Tories of Old Town and Meads. Mr. Glynde, a local squire, the member for Beachbourne West, might be trusted to behave himself. But young Stanley Bessemere, who, as the Colonel truly said, was for thrusting his toe into the crack of every door, would need watching—he and his cohorts of lady-workers.

The Committee took the Town Hall for the occasion, and arranged for the meeting to be at eight in the evening so that Labour might attend if it would.

The Colonel journeyed down to the East-end to ask Joe Burt to take an official part in the reception; but the engineer refused, to the Colonel's chagrin.

"A shall coom though," said Joe.

"And bring your mates along," urged the Colonel. "The old gentleman's worth seeing at all events. Mr. Geddes is coming."

"I was going to soop with Ernie Caspar and his missus," replied the engineer, looking a little foolish. "And we were coomin along together afterwards."

"Ah," laughed the Colonel, as he went out. "She's beat you!—I knew she would. Back the woman!"

Joe grinned in the door.

"Yes," he said. "Best get it over. That's my notion of it."

Bobs was still the most popular of Englishmen, if no longer the figure of romance he had been in the eyes of the British public for a few minutes during the South African war. His name drew; and the Town Hall was pleasantly full without being packed. Many came to see the old hero who cared little for his subject. Amongst these was Ruth Caspar who at Ernie's request for once had left her babes to the care of a friend. She stood at the back of the hall with her husband amongst her kind. Mrs. Trupp, passing, invited her to come forward; but Ruth had spied Alf at the platform end, a steward with a pink rosette, very smart, and deep in secret counsel with the Reverend Spink. Joe Burt, with critical bright eye everywhere, supported the wall next to her. The Colonel, hurrying by, threw a friendly glance at him.

"Ah," he said, "so you've found each other."

"Yes, sir," replied Ruth mischievously. "He's faced me at last, Mr. Burt has."

"And none the worse for it, I hope," said the Colonel.

"That's not for me to say, sir," answered Ruth, who was in gay mood.

Joe changed the subject awkwardly.

"A see young Bessemere's takin a prominent part in the proceedings," he said, nodding towards the platform. "He's two oughts above nothing, that young mon."

"Yes, young ass," replied the Colonel cheerfully. "Now if you'd come on the Committee as I asked you, you'd be there to keep him in his place. You play into the hands of your enemy!"

Then Bobby Chislehurst stopped for a word with Ruth and Ernie and their friend.

"Coom, Mr. Chislehurst!" chaffed the engineer. "A'm surprised to see you here. A thought you was a Pacifist."

"So I am," replied the other cheerily. "That's why I've come. I want to hear both sides."

Joe shook his bullet-head gravely.

"There's nobbut two sides in life," he said. "Right and Wrong. Which side is the Church on?"

Then the little Field-Marshal came on to the platform with the swift and resolute walk of the old Horse-gunner. He was nearly eighty now, but his figure was that of a youth, neat, slight, alert. Ruth remarked with interest that the hero was bow-legged, which she did not intend her children to be. For the rest, his kindly face of a Roman-nosed thoroughbred in training, his deep wrinkles, and close-cropped white hair, delighted her.

The great soldier proved no orator; but his earnestness more than compensated for his lack of eloquence.

After the meeting he came down into the body of the hall and held an informal reception. The Colonel introduced Mr. Geddes, and left the two together while he edged his way down to Joe Burt.

"Well, what d'you think of him?" he asked.

The engineer, his hands glued to the wall behind him, rocked to and fro.

"A like him better than his opinions," he grinned.

"You come along and have a word with him," urged the Colonel.

Joe shook a wary head.

"He's busy with Church and State," he said, nodding down the hall. "He don't need Labour."

Then Ruth chimed in almost shrilly for once.

"There's young Alf shook hands with him!"

"Always shovin of issalf!" muttered Ernie sourly. "He and Reverend Spink."

The old Field-Marshal was now coming slowly down the hall with a word here and a handshake there. Church and State, as Joe had truly said, were pressing him. Mrs. Trupp, indeed, and Mrs. Lewknor were fighting a heavy rearguard action against the Archdeacon and Stanley Bessemere and his cohorts, to cover the old soldier's retirement.

As the column drifted past Ernie and Ruth the Colonel stopped.

"An old Hammer-man, sir," he said. "And the mother of future Hammer-men."

Lord Roberts shook hands with Ruth, and turned to Ernie.

"What battalion?" he asked in his high-pitched voice.

"First, sir," answered Ernie, rigid at attention, in a voice Ruth had never heard before.

"Ah," said the old Field-Marshal. "They were with me in the march to Kandahar. Never shall I forget them!" He ran his eye shrewdly over the other. "Are you keeping fit?"

"Pretty fair, considering, sir," answered Ernie, relaxing suddenly as he had braced.

"Well, you'll be wanted soon," said Bobs, and passed on. "How these men run to seed, directly they leave the service, Lewknor!" he remarked to the Colonel on the stairs. "Now I daresay that fellow was a smart upstanding man when he was with you."

Ernie, thrilled at his adventure, went out into the cool night with Ruth, quietly amused at his excitement, beside him.

"Didn't 'alf look, Alf didn't, when he talked to you!" chuckled Ruth.

That was the main impression she had derived from the meeting, that and Lord Roberts's ears and the way they were stuck on to his head; but Ernie's mind was still in tumult.

"Where's Joe then?" he cried suddenly, and turned to see his pal still standing somewhat forlorn on the steps of the Town Hall.

He whistled and beckoned furiously.

"Come on, Joe!" he called. "Just down to the Wish and have a look at the sea."

But the engineer shook his head and turned slowly away down Grove Road.

"Nay, A know when A'm not wanted," he called. "Yoong lovers like to be alone."

"Sauce!" said Ruth, marching on with a little smile.

Ernie rejoined her.

"What d'you think of him?" he asked keenly.

"O, I liked him," said Ruth, cool and a trifle mischievous. "He's like a little bird—so alife like. And that tag of white beard to his chin like a billy-goat!—I did just want to pluck it!" She tittered and then recollected herself.

"I didn't mean Lord Roberts, fat-ead," retorted Ernie. "I meant Joe."

"O, that chap!" answered Ruth casually. "I didn't pay much heed to him. There's a lot o nature to him, I should reckon. Most in general there is—them black chaps, bull-built, wi curly tops to em."

She drifted back to Lord Roberts and the meeting.

"Only all that about war!—I don't like that. Don't seem right, not to my mind. There's a plenty enough troubles seems to me without them a-shoving great wars on top o you all for love."

Ernie felt that the occasion demanded a lecture and that he was pointed out as the man to give it. The chance, moreover, might not recur; and he must therefore make the most of it. He had this feeling less often perhaps than most men, and for that reason when he had it he had it strong. At the moment he was profoundly aware of the immense superiority of his sex; the political sagacity of Man; his power of taking statesmanlike views denied apparently to Woman.

"And what if Germany attacks us!" he asked censoriously. "Take it laying down, I suppose!—Spread yourself on the beach and let em tread on you as they land, so they don't wet their feet!"

"Germany won't interfere with you if you don't interfere with her, I reckon," Ruth answered calmly. "It's just the same as neighbours in the street. You're friends or un-friends, accordin as you like."

"What about Mrs. Ticehurst?" cried Ernie, feeling victory was his for once. "You didn't interfere with her, did you? Yet she tip the dust bin a-top o little Alice over the back-wall—to show she loved you, I suppose."

Ruth tilted a knowing chin.

"She aren't a neighbour, Mrs. Ticehurst aren't—not prarperly."

They were relapsing into broad Sussex as they always would when chaffing.

"What are she then?"

"She's a cat, sure-ly."

The night air, the thronged and brilliant sky, the rare change, the little bit of holiday, inspired and stimulated her. The Martha of much busyness had given place to the girl again. Immersed in the splendid darkness, she was in a delicious mood, cool, provocative, ironical; as Ernie had known her in that brief April of her life before Captain Royal had thrown a shadow across her path.

He threaded his arm through hers. Together they climbed the little Wish hill on the sea-front. From the top, by the old martello tower, they looked across the sea, white beneath the moon. Ernie's mood of high statesmanship had passed already.

"I don't see this Creeping Death they talk on," he said discontentedly.

"Ah," Ruth answered, sagacious in her turn. "Hap it's there though."

Ernie turned on her.

"I thart you just said..."

"No, I didn't then," she answered with magnificent unconcern. "All I say is—War and that, what's it got to do wi' we?"

As they came off the hill they met Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor crossing Madeira Walk on their way home.

"Where's your friend?" asked the Colonel.

"Gone back to his books and learning, sir, I reckon," replied Ruth. "He don't want us."

"Ah, you scared him, Mrs. Caspar," chaffed the Colonel.

"Scared him back to his revolution," commented Mrs. Lewknor.

Ruth laughed that deep silvery bell-like laughter of hers that seemed to make the night vibrate.

"He'd take some scaring, I reckon, that chap would," she said.

CHAPTER XI
THE RUSSET-COATED CAPTAIN

Joe Burt had been born at Rochdale of a mother whose favourite saying was:

"With a rocking-chair and a piece o celery a Lancasheer lass is aw reet."

At eight, she had entered the mill, doffing. Joe had entered the same mill at about the same age, doffing too. He worked bare-footed in the ring-room in the days when overlookers and jobbers carried straps and used them.

When he was fifteen his mother died, and his father married again.

"Thoo can fend for self," his step-mother told him straightway, with the fine directness of the North.

Joe packed his worldly possessions in a chequered handkerchief, especially his greatest treasure—a sixpenny book bought off a second-hand bookstall at infinite cost to the buyer and called The Hundred Best Thoughts. Then he crossed the common at night, falling into a ditch on the way, to find the lodging-house woman who was to be his mother for the next ten years drinking her Friday pint o beer. He was earning six shillings a week at the time in a bicycle-shop. Later he entered a big engineering firm and, picking up knowledge as he went along, was a first-class fitter when he was through his time.

Those were the days when George Barnes was Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and leading the great engineers' strike of the early nineties. Labour was still under the heel of Capital, but squealing freely. Socialism, apart from a few thinkers, was the gospel of noisy and innocuous cranks; and advanced working-men still called themselves Radicals.

Young Joe woke up sooner than most to the fact that he was the slave of an environment that was slowly throttling him because it denied him opportunity to be himself—which is to say to grow. He discarded chapel for ever on finding that his step-mother was a regular worshipper at Little Bethel, and held in high esteem amongst the congregation. He read Robert Blatchford in the Clarion, went to hear Keir Hardie, who with Joey Arch was dodging in and out of Parliament during those years, heralds of the advancing storm, and took some part in founding the local branch of the newly-formed Independent Labour Party. When his meditative spirit tired of the furious ragings of the Labour Movement of those early days, he would retire to the Friends' Meeting-house on the hill and ruminate there over the plain tablet set in the turf which marks appropriately the resting place of the greatest of modern Quakers.

The eyes of the intelligent young fitter were opening fast now; and the death of the head of his firm completed the process and gave him sight.

"Started from nothing. Left £200,000. Bequeathed each of his servants £2 for every year of service; but nothing for us as had made the money."

Joe was now a leading man in the local A.S.E. His Society recognised his work and sent him in the early years of our century to Ruskin College, Oxford. The enemies of that institution are in the habit of saying that it spoils good mechanics to make bad Labour leaders. The original aim of the College was to take men from the pit, the mill, the shop, pour into them light and learning in the rich atmosphere of the most ancient of our Universities, and then return them whence they came to act amongst their fellows as lamps in the darkness and living witnesses of the redeeming power of education. The ideal, noble in itself, appealed to the public; but like many such ideals, it foundered on the invincible rock of human nature. The miners, weavers, and engineers, who were the students, after their year amid the towers and courts of Oxford, showed little desire to return whence they came. Rather they made their newly-acquired power an instrument to enable them to evade the suffocating conditions under which they were born; and who shall blame them? They became officials in Labour Bureaux, Trade Union leaders, Secretaries of Clubs, and sometimes the hangers-on of the wealthy supporters of the Movement.

Burt was a shining exception to the rule. At the end of his academic year he returned to the very bench in the very shop he had left a year before, with enlarged vision, ordered mind, increased conviction; determined from that position to act as Apostle to the Gentiles of the Old Gospel in its new form.

He was the not uncommon type of intellectual artisan of that day who held as the first article of his creed that no working-man ought to marry under the economic conditions that then prevailed; and that if Nature and circumstance forced him to take a wife that he was not morally justified in having children. This attitude involving as it inevitably must a levy on the only capital that is of enduring value to a country—its Youth—was thrust upon thoughtful workers, as Joe was never tired of pointing out, by the patriotic class, who refused their employees the leisure, the security, the material standards of life necessary to modern man for his full development.

Joe practised what he preached, and was himself unmarried. Apart, indeed, from an occasional fugitive physical connection as a youth with some passing girl, he had never fairly encountered a woman; never sought a woman; never, certainly, heard the call that refuses to be denied, spirit calling to spirit, flesh to flesh, was never even aware of his own deep need. Women for him were still a weakness to be avoided. They were the necessaries of the feeble, an encumbrance to the strong. That was his view, the view of the crude boy. And he believed himself lucky to be numbered among the uncalled for he was in fact a sober fanatic, living as selflessly for his creed as ever did those first preachers of unscientific Socialism, the Apostles and Martyrs of the first centuries of our era. Even in the shop he had his little class of students, pouring the milk of the word into their ears as he set their machines, and the missionary spirit drove him always on to fresh enterprise.

The Movement, as he always called it, was well ablaze by the second decade of the century in the Midlands and the North, but in the South it still only smouldered. And when Hewson and Clarke started their aeroplane department at Beachbourne, and began to build machines for the Government, Joe Burt, a first-rate mechanic, leapt at the chance offered him by the firm and crossed the Thames with his books, his brains, his big heart, to carry the Gospel of Redemption by Revolution to the men of Sussex as centuries before, his spiritual ancestor, St. Wilfrid, he too coming from the North, had done. In that strange land with its smooth-bosomed hills, its shining sea, its ca-a-ing speech, he found everything politically as he had expected. And yet it was in the despised South that he discovered the woman who was to rouse in him the fierce hunger of which till then he had been unaware except as an occasional crude physical need.

As on Saturday or Sunday afternoons at the time the revelation was coming to him he roamed alone, moody and unmated, the rogue-man, amid the round-breasted hills he often paused to mark their resemblance to the woman who was rousing in his deeps new and terrible forces of which he had previously been unaware. In her majestic strength, her laughing tranquillity, even in her moods, grave or gay, the spirit mischievously playing hide-and-seek behind the smooth appearance, she was very much the daughter of the hills amid which she had been bred.

Ruth was as yet deliciously unaware of her danger. She was, indeed, unaware of any danger save that which haunts the down-sitting and up-rising of every working woman throughout the world—the abiding spectre of insecurity.

She liked this big man, surly and self-conscious, and encouraged his visits. Not seldom as she moved amid her cups and saucers in the back-ground of the kitchen, she would turn eye or ear to the powerful stranger with the rough eloquence sucking his pipe by the fire and holding forth to Ernie on his favourite theme. It flattered her that he who notoriously disliked women should care to come and sit in her kitchen, lifting an occasional wary eyelid as he talked to look at her. And when she caught his glance he would scowl like a boy detected playing truant.

"I shan't hurt you then, Mr. Burt," she assured him with the caressing tenderness that is mockery.

His chin sunk on his chest.

"A'm none that sure," he growled.

Ernie winked at Ruth.

"Call him Joe," he suggested. "Then hap he'll be less frit."

"Wilta?" asked Ruth, daintily mimicking the accent of her guest.

"Thoo's mockin a lad," muttered Joe, delighted and relapsing into broader Lancashire.

"Nay, ma lad," retorted Ruth. "A dursena. A'm far ower scared."

CHAPTER XII
RUTH WAKES

Apart from such occasional sallies Ruth paid little attention to her husband's friend or, indeed, to anything outside her home. Now that she had dropped her anchor in the quiet waters of love sheltered by law, and had her recovered self-respect to buttress her against the batterings of a wayward world, she was snug, even perhaps a little selfish with the self-absorption of the woman who is wrapped up in that extension of herself which is her home, her children, and the man who has given them her.

After her stormy flight she had settled down in her nest, and seldom peeped over at the cat prowling beneath or at anybody, indeed, but the cock-bird bringing back a grub for supper; and him she peeped for pretty often. She was busy too with the unending busyness of the woman who is her own cook, housekeeper, parlourmaid, nurse and laundress. And happily for her she had the qualities that life demands of the woman who bears the world's burden—a magnificent physique to endure the wear and tear of it all, the invaluable capacity of getting on well with her neighbours, method in her house, tact with her husband, a way with her children.

And there was no doubt that on the whole she was happy. The reaction from the sturm-und-drang period before her marriage was passing but had not yet wholly passed. Her spirit still slept after the hurricane. Naturally a little indolent, and living freely and fully, if without passion, her nature flowed pleasantly through rich pastures along the channels grooved in earth by the age-long travail of the spirit.

Jenny and little Ned followed Susie, just a year between each child. Ernie loved his children, especially always the last for the time being; but the element of wonder had vanished and with it much of the impetus that had kept him steady for so long.

"How is it now?" asked his mate, on hearing of the birth of the boy.

"O, it's all right," answered Ernie, wagging his head. "Only it ain't quite the same like. You gets used to it, as the sayin is."

"And you'll get use-ter to it afore you're through, you'll see," his friend answered, not without a touch of triumphant bitterness. He liked others to suffer what he had suffered himself.

As little by little the romance of wife and children began to lose its glamour, and the economic pressure steadily increased, the old weakness began at times to re-assert itself in Ernie. He haunted the Star over much. Joe Burt chaffed him.

"Hitch your wagon to a star by all means, Ern," he said. "But not that one."

Mr. Pigott too cautioned him once or twice, alike as friend and employer.

"Family man now, you know, Ernie," he said.

The sinner was always disarming in his obviously sincere penitence.

"I knaw I've unbuttoned a bit of late, sir," he admitted. "I'll brace up. I will and I can."

And at the critical moment the fates, which seemed as fond of Ernie as was everybody else, helped him.

Susie, his first-born, caught pneumonia. The shock stimulated Ernie; as shock always did. The steel that was in him gleamed instantly through the rust.

"Say, we shan't lose her!" he asked Mr. Trupp in staccato voice.

Mr. Trupp knew Ernie, knew his weakness, knew human nature.

"Can't say," he muttered. "Might not."

Ern went to the window and looked out on the square tower of the old church on the Kneb above him. His eyes were bright and his uncollared neck seemed strangely long and thin.

"She's got to live," he muttered defiantly.

The doctor nodded grimly.

The Brute had pounced on Ernie sleeping and was shaking him as a dog shakes a rat. Mr. Trupp, who had no intention of losing Susie, was by no means sorry.

"If it's got to be, it's got to be," said Ruth, busy with poultices. "Only it won't be if I can help it."

She was calm and strong as Ernie was fiercely resentful. That angered Ernie, who was seeking someone to punish in his pain.

When Mr. Trupp had left he turned on Ruth.

"You take it cool enough!" he said with a rare sneer.

She looked at him, surprised.

"Well, where's the sense in wearin yourself into a fret?" answered Ruth. "That doosn't help any as I can see."

"Ah, I knaw!" he said. "You needn't tell me."

She put down the poultice and regarded him with eyes in which there was a thought of challenge.

"What d'you knaw, Ern?"

There was something formidable about her very quiet.

"What I do, then," he said, and turned his back on her. "If it was somebody else, we should soon see."

She came to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and turned him so that she could read his face. He did not look at her.

She turned slowly away, drawing in her breath as one who rouses reluctantly from sleep.

"That's it, is it?" she said wearily. "I thart it'd come to that some day."

Just then little Alice danced in from the street, delicate, pale sprite, with anemone-like health and beauty.

"Daddy-paddy!" she said, smiling up at him, as she twined her fingers into his.

He bent and kissed her with unusual tenderness.

"Pray for our little Sue, Lal," he muttered.

The child looked up at him with fearless eyes of forget-me-not blue.

"I be," she said.

He gave her a hand, and they went out together into Motcombe Garden: for they were the best of friends.

Ruth was left. In her heart she had always known that this would come: he would turn on her some day. And she did not blame him: she was too magnanimous. Men were like that, men were. They couldn't help theirsalves. Any one of them but Ernie would have thrown her past up at her long before. She was more grateful for his past forbearance than resentful at his present vindictiveness. Now that the blow, so long hovering above her in the dimness of sab-consciousness, had fallen she felt the pain of it, dulled indeed by the fact that she was already suffering profoundly on Susie's account. But the impact braced her; and it was better so. There was no life without suffering and struggle. If you faced that fact with your eyes open, never luxuriating in the selfishness of make-believe, compelling your teeth to meet on the granite realities of life, then there would be no dreadful shock as you fell out of your warm bed and rosy dreams into an icy pool.

Ruth went back to her hum-drum toil. She had been dreaming. Now she must awake. It was Ernie who had roused her from that dangerous lethargy with a brutal slash across the face; and she was not ungrateful to him.

When he returned an hour later with little Alice she was unusually tender to him, though her eyes were rainwashed. He on his side was clearly ashamed and stiff accordingly. He said nothing; instead he was surly in self-defence.

To make amends he sat up with the child that night and the next.

"Shall you save her, sir?" asked the scare-crow on the third morning.

"I shan't," replied the doctor. "Her mother may."

Next day when Mr. Trupp came he grunted the grunt, so familiar to his patients, that meant all was well.

When the corner was turned Ern did not apologise to Ruth, though he longed to do so; nor did she ask it of him. To save himself without undergoing the humiliation of penance, and to satisfy that most easily appeased of human faculties, his conscience, he resorted to a trick ancient as Man: he went to chapel.

Mr. Pigott who had stood in that door at that hour in that frock-coat for forty years past, to greet alike the sinner and the saved, welcomed the lost sheep, who had not entered the fold for months.

"I know what this means," he said, shaking hands. "You needn't tell me. I congratulate you. Go in and give thanks."

Ern bustled in.

"I shall come regular now, sir," he said. "I've had my lesson. You can count on me."

"Ah," said Mr. Pigott, and said no more.

Next Sunday indeed he waited grimly and in vain for the prodigal.

"Soon eased off," he muttered, as he closed the door at last. "One with a very sandy soil."

The Manager of the Southdown Transport Company went home that evening to the little house on the Lewes Road in unaccomodating mood.

"His trousers are coming down all right," he told his wife. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Once you let go o God——"

"God lets go o you," interposed Mrs. Pigott. "Tit for tat."

CHAPTER XIII
NIGHTMARE

A few days later on his way back to the Manor-house from visiting his little patient in the Moot, the old surgeon met Mr. Pigott, who stopped to make enquiries.

"She'll do now," said Mr. Trupp.

"And that fellow?"

"Who?"

"Her father."

Mr. Trupp looked at the windy sky, torn to shreds and tatters by the Sou-west wind above the tower of the parish-church.

"He wanted the Big Stick and he got it," he said. "If it came down on his shoulders once a week regularly for a year he'd be a man. Steady pressure is what a fellow like that needs. And steady pressure is just what you don't get in a disorganised society such as ours."

The old Nonconformist held up a protesting hand.

"You'd better go to Germany straight off!" he cried. "That's the only place you'd be happy in."

Mr. Trupp grinned.

"No need," he said, "Germany's coming here. Ask the Colonel!"

"Ah!" scolded the other. "You and your Colonels! You go and hear Norman Angell on the Great Illusion at the Town Hall on Friday. You go and hear a sensible man talk sense. That'll do you a bit of good. Mr. Geddes is going to take the chair."

The old surgeon turned on his way, grinning still.

"The Colonel's squared Mr. Geddes," he said. "He's all right now."

What Mr. Trupp told Mr. Pigott, more it is true in chaff than in earnest, was partially true at least. Liberalism was giving way beneath the Colonel's calculated assault. After Lord Roberts's visit to Beachbourne the enemy dropped into the lines of the besiegers sometimes in single spies and sometimes in battalions. Only Mr. Pigott held out stubbornly, and that less perhaps from conviction than from a sense of personal grievance against the Colonel. For three solid years the pugnacious old Nonconformist had been trying to fix a quarrel on the man he wished to make his enemy; but his adversary had eluded battle with grace and agility. That in itself happily afforded a good and unforgiveable cause of offence.

"They won't fight, these soldiers!" he grumbled to his wife.

"They leave that to you pacifists," replied the lady, brightly.

"Pack o poltroons!" scolded the old warrior. "One can respect the Archdeacon at least because he has the courage of his opinions. But this chap!"

Yet if Liberalism as a whole was finding grace at last, Labour in the East-end remained obdurate, as only a mollusc can; and Labour was gaining power for all men to see.

In the general elections of 1910, indeed, the two Conservative candidates, Stanley Bessemere, East, and Mr. Glynde, West, romped home. The Colonel was neither surprised nor deceived by the results of the elections. He knew now that in modern England in the towns at all events, among the rising generation, there were few Conservative working men—though there were millions who might and in fact did vote for Conservative candidates; and not many Radicals—apart from a leaven of sturdy middle-aged survivors of the Gladstonian age. The workers as a whole, it was clear, as they grew in class-consciousness, were swinging slow as a huge tide, and almost as unconscious, towards the left. But they were not articulate; they were not consistent; they changed their labels as they changed their clothes, and as yet they steadfastly refused to call themselves Socialists. Indeed, in spite of the local Conservative victory, the outstanding political feature of the moment, apart from the always growing insurgency of Woman, was the advance of Labour, as the Colonel and many other thoughtful observers noted. He began, moreover, to see that behind the froth, the foam, and arrant nonsense of the extreme section of the movement, there was gathering a solid body of political philosophy. The masses were becoming organised—an army, no longer a rabble; with staff, regimental officers, plan of campaign, and an always growing discipline. And, whether you agreed with it or not, there was no denying that the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission was a political portent.

When Joe Burt came up to Undercliff, as he sometimes did, to smoke and chat with the Colonel, Mrs. Lewknor, a whole-hearted Tory, would attack him on the tyranny of Trade Unions with magnificent fury.

She made no impression on the engineer, stubborn as herself.

"War is war; and discipline is discipline. And in war it's the best disciplined Army that wins. A should have thought a soldier'd have realised that much. And this isna one o your little wars, mind ye! This is the Greatest War that ever was or will be. And we workers are fighting for our lives."

"Discipline is one thing and tyranny is quite another!" cried Mrs. Lewknor, with flashing eyes.

The Colonel, who delighted in these pitched battles, sat and sucked his pipe on the fringe of the hub-bub; only now and then turning the cooling hose of his irony on the combatants.

"It is," he said in his detached way. "Discipline is pressure you exert on somebody else. And tyranny is pressure exerted by somebody else upon you."

And it was well he was present to introduce the leaven of humour into the dough of controversy, for Mrs. Lewknor found the engineer a maddening opponent. He was so cool, so logical, and above all so dam provocative, as the little lady remarked with a snap of her still perfect teeth. He gave no quarter and asked none.

"I don't like him," she said with immense firmness to the Colonel after one of these encounters, standing in characteristic attitude, her skirt a little lifted, and one foot daintily poised on the fender-rail. "I don't trust him one inch."

"He is a bit mad-doggy," the other said, entwining his long legs. "But he is genuine."

Then two significant incidents cast the shadow of coming events on the screen of Time.

In July, 1911, Germany sent the Panther to Agadir. There ensued a sudden first-class political crisis; and a panic on every Stock Exchange in Europe.

Even Ernie was moved. This man who, in spite of Joe Burt's teaching, took as yet little more account of political happenings than does the field-mouse of the manoeuvres of the reaping machine that will shortly destroy its home, crossed the golf links one evening and walked through Meads to find out what the Colonel thought.

"What's it going to be, sir?" he asked.

The other refused to commit himself.

"Might be anything," he said. "Looks a bit funny."

"Think the reservists will be called up?"

The old soldier evinced a curious restrained keenness as of a restive horse desiring to charge a fence and yet uncertain of what it will find on the far side. The Colonel, appraising him with the shrewd eyes of the man used to judging men, was satisfied.

"I shouldn't be surprised," was all he would say.

The old Hammer-man walked away along the cliff in the direction of Meads, and dropped down on to the golf links to go home by the ha-ha outside the Duke's Lodge. Then he swung away under the elms of Compton Place Road and turned into Saffrons Croft, where Ruth and the children were to have met him. He looked about for them in vain. The cricketers were there as always, the idlers strolling from group to group, but no Ruth. Ernie who had been looking forward to a quiet half-hour's play with little Alice and Susie on the turf in the shade of the elms before bed-time felt himself thwarted and resentful. Ruth as a rule was reliable; but of late, ever since his unkindness to her at the time of Susie's illness, three weeks since, he had marked a change in her, subtle perhaps but real. True she denied him nothing; but unlike herself, she gave without generosity, coldly and as a duty.

Nursing his grievance, he dropped down the steep hill under the Manor-house wall, past the Greys, into Church Street.

At the Star a little group was gossiping, heads together. As he crossed the road they turned and looked at him with curiosity and in silence. Then a mate of his in the Transport Company called across,

"Sorry to hear this, Ern."

Ernie, thinking the man referred to the probabilities that he would be called back to the Army, and proud of his momentary fortuitous importance, shouted back with an air of appropriate nonchalance,

"That's all right, Guy. I wouldn't mind a spell with the old regiment again—that I wouldn't."

At the foot of Borough Lane he met Alf bustling along. His brother did not pause, but gave Ernie a searching look as he passed and said, "Watch it, Ern!"

Ern experienced a strange qualm as he approached his home. The door was open; nobody was about; there was not a sound in the house—neither the accustomed chirp of the children, nor the voice and movements of their mother.

The nightmare terrors that are wont to seize the sensitive at such times, especially if their conscience is haunted, laid hold of him. The emptiness, the silence appalled him. Death, so it seemed to his imaginative mind, reigned where the life and warmth and pleasant human busyness the woman and her children create had formerly been. Ever since that dark moment when he had let loose those foul and treacherous words, he had been uneasy in his mind; and yet, though usually the humblest of men, some stubborn imp of pride had possessed him and refused to allow him to express the contrition he genuinely felt. Perhaps the very magnitude of his offence had prevented him from making just amends.

Ruth on her side had said nothing; but she had felt profoundly the wound he had inflicted on her heart. So much her silence and unusual reserve had told him. Had he gone too far? Had her resentment been deeper than he had divined? Had he by his stupid brutality in a moment of animal panic and animal pain snapped the light chain that bound him to this woman he loved so dearly and knew so little? And none was more conscious than he how fragile was that chain. Ruth had never been immersed in love for him: she had never pretended to be. He knew that. She had been an affectionate and most loyal friend; and that was all.

On the threshold of his home he paused and stared down with the frightened snort of a horse suddenly aware of an abyss gaping at his feet.

For the first time in his married life the instant sense of his insecurity, always present in his subconsciousness, leapt into the light of day.

He gathered himself and marched upstairs as a man marches up the steps of the scaffold to pay the merited punishment for his crimes.

Then he heard a little noise. The door of the back room where the children, all but the baby, slept, was open. He peeped in. Susie was there, and Jenny with her. Hope returned to him. They were sitting up in bed still in outdoor clothes. Then he noticed that the baby's cot which stood of wont in the front room beside the big bed was here too. His sudden relief changed to anguish. He saw it all: his children, the three of them, packed away together like fledgelings in a nest—for him to mother; and the mother-bird herself and her child flown!

And he had brought his punishment on to his own head!

Susie waved a rag-doll at him and giggled.

"Neddy seeps with Susie!" she cried. "Susie nurse him! Mummy's gone with man!"

Brutally Ernie burst into the bedroom.

Two people stood beside the bed—his wife and a man; one on either side of it.

The man was Joe Burt; the woman Ruth.

On the bed between them lay little Alice, wan as a lily, her eyes closed apparently in death.

As he entered Joe raised a hushing finger.

"It's all right, Ern. She isna dead," said the engineer, comfortably.

Ruth, who was the colour of the child on the bed, had turned to him and now wreathed her arms about him.

"O Ern!" she cried in choking voice. "I am that glad you've come."

For a moment she hung on him, dependent as he had never known her.

Then the child stirred, opened her eyes, saw Ernie at the foot of the bed, and smiled.

"Daddy," came her sweet little voice.

Her eyes fell on Joe; her lovely brow crumpled and she wailed,

"Don't want man."

"That's me," said Joe gently, and stole towards the door on tip-toe. Ern followed him out.

Mr. Trupp met them on the stairs.

At the outer door Joe gave a whispered account of what had happened. He had been crossing Saffrons Croft on the way up to see Ernie, when he had noticed Ruth and the children under the elms. Little Alice had seen him and come rushing through the players towards her friend. A cricket-ball had struck her on the forehead; and he had carried her home like a dead thing. Outside the cottage they had met Alf, and Ruth had asked him to go for Mr. Trupp.

Ernie ran back upstairs.

The old surgeon, bending over the child, gave him a reassuring glance.

"The child's all right," he said. "See to the mother!" and nodded to Ruth, who was holding on to the mantel-piece.

She was swaying. Ern gathered her to him. The whole of her weight seemed on him. His eyes hung on her face, pale beneath its dark crown as once, and only once, he had seen it before—that time she lay on the bed in Royal's dressing-room on the dawn of her undoing.

"Ruth," he called quietly.

Slowly she returned to life, opening her eyes, and drawing her hand across them.

"Is that you, Ern?" she sighed. "O, that's right. I come all over funny like. Silly! I'm all right now."

Ernie lowered her into a chair.

She sat a moment, gathering herself. Then she looked up at him—and remembered. She had been caught. Fear came over her, and she began to tremble.

He bent and kissed her.

"I'm sorry I said that, Ruth," he whispered in her ear.

A lovely light welled up into her eyes. At that moment she was nearer loving him than she had ever been. Regardless of Mr. Trupp's presence, she put a hand on either of his shoulders, and regarded him steadfastly, a baffling look on her face.

"Dear Ern!" she said. "Only I'd liefer you didn't say it again. See, it do hurt from you."

CHAPTER XIV
SHADOWS

Ern was not called up after all.

The trap-door through which men had peered aghast into the fires of hell, closed suddenly as it had opened. Only the clang of the stokers working in the darkness under the earth could still be heard day and night at their infernal busyness by any who paused and laid ear to the ground.

England and the world breathed again.

"Touch and go," said Mr. Trupp, who felt like a man coming to the surface after a deep plunge.

"Dress rehearsal," said the Colonel.

"It'll never be so near again!" Mr. Pigott announced pontifically to his wife. "Never!"

"Thank you," replied that lady. "May we take it from you?"

When it was over the Colonel found that the walls of Jericho had fallen: the Liberal Citadel had been stormed. Mr. Geddes took the chair at a meeting at St. Andrew's Hall to discuss the programme of the League.

"It looks as if you were right after all," the tall minister said to the Colonel gravely.

"Pray heaven I'm not," the other answered in like tones.

The second significant incident of this time, which occurred during a lull before the final flare-up of the long-drawn Agadir crisis, had less happy results from the point of view of the old soldier.

In August, suddenly and without warning, the railway-men came out. The Colonel had been up to London for the night on the business of the League, and next morning had walked into Victoria Street Station to find it in possession of the soldiers: men in khaki in full marching order, rifle, bayonet, and bandolier; sentries everywhere; and on the platform a Union official in a blue badge urging the guard to come out.

The guard, a heavy-shouldered middle-aged fellow, was stubbornly lumping along the platform on flat feet, swinging his lantern.

"I've got a heart," he kept on reiterating. "I've got a wife and children to think of."

"So've I," replied the official, dogging him. "It's because I am thinking of them that I'm out."

"Silly 'aound!" said a bystander