Nigel was late for supper that evening. He came in very quietly, and slipped into his place without a word. He had very little to say about the races.

"Lost your money on Midsummer Moon?" said Leonard. "Well, you needn\'t look so glum—it was only five bob."

But Janey knew that was not the matter, though she knew nothing more. After supper she put her arm through his, and drew him out into the garden. They walked up and down in front of Sparrow Hall. At first she had meant to ask him questions, but soon she realised that the questions would not come—only a great stillness between her and Nigel, and a fierce clutch of their hands. They walked up and down, up and down, breathing the thick scents of the garden—touched with autumn rottenness, sodden with rain and night. Gradually they pulled each other closer, till she felt the throb of his heart under her hand....

The next day Nigel worked hard with Len at weed-burning. It was strange what a lot of weed-burning there was to do, thought he—not only at Sparrow Hall, but at Wilderwick, and Swites Farm, and Golden Compasses, and the Two-Mile Cottages, and all those places from which little curls of blue, dream-scented smoke were drifting[Pg 136] up against the sky. Men were burning the tangles of their summer gardens, they were piling into the flame those trailing sweets, now dead. For autumn was here, and winter was at hand, and a few dead things that must be burnt were all that remained of June.

Nigel wondered if his June had not gone too, and if he had not better burn at once those few sweet, dead, tangled thoughts it had left him. He thought of the dim lane by Goatsluck Farm, with the glare of two motor lights on the hedges. He saw the puddles gleam, and Tony erect in the trickery of light and darkness, shapeless in his coat. Then across the aching silence of his heart came her words—"I can\'t bear it!—I—I\'m so—disappointed."

That was the end of June—and he ought to have expected it. His friendship with Tony Strife could never have lasted in a neighbourhood where both were known and talked about. It had ended a little suddenly, that was all. He did not reproach himself for deceiving her; he did not even regret it, though he guessed what she must think. The doorway of the house of light had stood open, and he had crept in like a beggar, knowing that he must soon be turned out, but resolute meanwhile to bask and be glad.

But he wished she had not been "disappointed," that was so pathetic. Poor little girl! the memory of him would eat into her heart for a while. Girls of her age were righteous, and he had cheated her into friendship with unrighteousness. She would hate him for a bit. "I am so disappointed"—it[Pg 137] seemed as if all his seething desires for goodness and peace had died into that little wail of outraged girlhood, and come back to haunt the empty house of his heart.

During the first few days of separation he childishly hoped that he might hear from her—surely she would write if only to upbraid. But no letter came. His coat was returned the next morning, but he searched the parcel in vain for a message. How cruel of Tony!—and yet all children, even girl-children, are cruel. Their experience of sorrow is limited to its tempestuous side—they do not know its aching calms; they quench their thirst with great gulps, and do not know the relief of small drops of water. This was the price he had to pay for seeking his comfort in the gaiety of boys and girls instead of in the more stable sympathy of his contemporaries.

The next two weeks were heartsick and lonely. All day long a piteous consciousness of Tony was present in the background of his thoughts, waiting till night to creep into the foreground of his dreams, and torment him with hungry wakings. Everything that reminded him even of her type was painful. Little ridiculous things twanged chords of plaintive memory—a picture of the Roedean hockey-team, with their short skirts and pig-tails, the demure flappers he sometimes met in his walks, a correspondence on "moral training in girls\' schools" which was being waged in a daily paper—everything that reminded him of healthy, growing, undeveloped girlhood, reminded him of Tony,[Pg 138] and made his heart ache and yearn and grieve after her.

He wandered about by himself a good deal in the lanes, snatching his few free moments after dusk. He no longer tramped furiously—he roamed, with slow steps and dreaming eyes, drinking a faint peace from the darkness of the fields. He found comfort, too, in his fiddle, and every evening he would play through his banal repertory, "O Caro Nome," from Rigoletto, "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls," the overtures to Zampa and La Gazza Ladra, the Finale from Lucia di Lammermoor. He became wonderfully absorbed in his fiddling, and had recovered a certain amount of his old skill and flexibility.

One day he took his violin to East Grinstead, as the sounding post had fallen down. He came back by a long road—through Hophurst and New Chapel and Blindley Heath. He stopped at the last to have a drink—it was a dreary collection of cottages, scattered round a flat, windswept heath. There were ponds in the corners of the heath, and their waters were always ruffled by a strange wind. Right in the middle of the waste was a little house squatting in its own patch of tillage, an island, a tumble-down oasis, in the great dreariness.

The scene, with the grey, scudding sky behind it, became stamped on Nigel\'s brain, as he stood with his beer in the pothouse door. It was one of those days when it seems as if our own hopelessness has at last impressed the unfeeling mask[Pg 139] of Nature, and caused it to put on the grimace of our despair.

One or two children were playing in the road in front of the tavern, the wind fluttering their pinafores, and blowing their clothes against their limbs. A little boy with a mouth-organ was playing a vague and plaintive tune, to which two little girls were dancing. Nigel stood listening for some minutes, till both the moaning wind and the creaking tune had woven themselves together into a symphony of wretchedness.

Then he put down his beer, and took up his violin. He unfastened the case, unrolled the chrysalis of wrappings, and laid the instrument against his shoulder. The next minute a shrill wail rose up and challenged the wind.

The bar was nearly empty, but Nigel would not have cared had it been full. He stood in the doorway, his hair blowing and ruffling madly, his body swaying, as he forced his fiddle into a duet with the wind. He had never before tried to extemporise, his violin had been for him a memory of sugary tunes, each wrapped up in the tinsel of a little past—he had never tried to wring the present out of it in a sudden, fierce expression of the emotions that tortured him as he played. This evening he wanted to join the wind in its wailing race, to rush with it over the common, to tear with it through the hedges, and sweep with it over the water. He forced out of his fiddle the cries of his own heart—they rose up and challenged the wind. The wind hushed a little—fluttered, throbbed—was still ... the fiddle tore through the silenc............