FOR several days a morbid dejection had possessed the heavens, and clouds pressed gray and ponderous from over the sea. Rain had fallen perpetually, beating the beauty from the flowers, weighing down the foliage. A chill atmosphere had swept like the breath of an ice giant into the radiant loggias of summer. The wind never rested. It moaned and imprecated, pleaded and besought, broke forth into wild gusts of desperate blasphemy. The trees whispered together like shivering and misty ghosts before the gates of death. Their dim arms gesticulated in the rain. Their green bosoms stirred with a troubled breathing, impotent and piteous.

Atmospheric conditions exert an undue influence over minds that have wandered from the radiance of health into the twilight of morbidity. The stanch, big-chested toiler takes the storm into his bosom and laughs like a Norseman buffeting ice-brilliant seas. To those of feeble moral vitality the drearier passages of life are packed with intangible temptations and imagined possibilities for sin. The man whose heart is warm and clean cares nothing for rough weather. It is the bleached ?sthetic who turns pessimist or sensualist to cheat his own shivering and hungry soul. Give the world a Tolsto?, rugged viking struggling giant-like towards the truth, rather than some De Musset or Baudelaire hugging an impotent sexuality in the lap of a prostituted art. The world needs prophets, not pessimists. Pessimism is the result of moral dyspepsia. It is a nobler thing to lift some simple lamp of truth to light the hearts of men than to build a brilliant philosophic system for the entangling of the intellect.

Zeus Gildersedge had suffered for a week from an exaggerated melancholia. Evil weather always appeared to irritate his opiated brain, inspiring a more sinister barbarism, a more restless temper. No man can quench utterly his primitive intuitions. When the wind howled Zeus Gildersedge shivered, drew his ragged philosophy closer about his soul, and warmed his marrow with a more generous share of wine. The wind woke the coward in him, revealed that native superstition that is lodged deep in every heart. Moreover, certain words that he had heard in the silence of his own garden had haunted his brain like the emissaries of an outraged God. He had been drinking heavily, and taking more opium than even his Mithridatic body could tolerate. His hands trembled more; his moods were violent and spasmodic; an unusual restlessness interfered with his mechanical régime.

It was the evening of a gray and blustering day. The rain had ceased, and streaks of silvery light were ribbing the clouds. A calm had fallen; the wind breathed in infrequent stanzas, showering rattling moisture from the leaves. A rich perfume refreshed the atmosphere, the scent of foliage drenched yet shimmering in the awakening sun.

Joan Gildersedge came over the meadows from the sea. She loved rough weather and the cold kisses of the rain upon her face. Her rough frieze skirt hung drenched about her knees, and her hair was dark and wet with the storm. A rich color had risen in her cheeks, scourged by the wet west wind.

Joan looked long at the breaking sky before setting the iron gate grating on its rusty hinges. The gravel drive was green with grass and weeds. As she threaded its tangled shadows, the cypresses, stirred by the wind, shook long showers of glittering dew. At one point a large seringa overweighted by the storm bowed over to touch the trailing branches of an untrimmed laurel. Joan had to bend beneath this rustic yoke. A spray of green leaves brushed her lips, leaves pure and fresh as the lips they had touched.

As she drew from the shadows of the shrubs sounds sinister in their suggestiveness smote upon her ears. Two voices were in altercation—the one shrill, strenuous, feminine, the other the untutored growl of a man scorning compulsion. Joan Gildersedge stood still and listened. The window of the dining-room stood open; she could hear plainly enough what passed within.

“I tell you I sha’n’t,” said the woman’s voice, very rapidly. “Do yer think I’m going to sell myself for fifteen pounds a year? You go and cheat your grandmother. You’re drunk, Zeus Gildersedge, and what do I care for an old sot of sixty. Am I to drudge and scrape and sell myself here for nothing? I’ve had enough of it, I tell you. You give me that key, old light of love, and I’ll help myself for once. Come along now, or I’ll make no sport for you.”

The man’s voice retorted, thick and tangled, the expression of a clouded and cunning intellect.

“You think I’m drunk, eh?”

“Half an’ half.”

“You’re a pretty beauty. Give you the key of my strong-box, eh? Nice game, that. Pretty old gudgeon you think you’re talking to. I’m drunk, am I? Not fuddled enough yet to be fooled by such as you.”

The woman’s voice rose shriller.

“You’re a man, you are. Take all and give nothing. Taunt me, would you?”

“Who’s to blame? Speak up.”

“That’s manly, that is. Put it all off your own shoulders; shove all the blame on mine. You’re the saint, are you, and I the sinner? You owe me a quarter’s wages. I’ll have that and more—fifty gold sovereigns, not a farthing less. ’Ain’t I earned it by sacrificing my immortal soul to an old scarecrow like you?”

“You have, you innocent.”

“Give me the key, then.”

An outbreak of blasphemy greeted the appeal. Zeus Gildersedge chuckled and swore in alternation. He had lost every shred of that quality that might have been christened by courtesy self-control.

“That’s right,” jeered the feminine voice, “cheat a woman and then laugh over it. More drink! Whiskey—neat, too! Half a tumbler! Nice stuff for a respectable man of sixty! You’ll be seeing devils in a jiffy.”

The clatter of glass sounded in the room. Joan Gildersedge slipped round towards the porch under the shadows of the trees. She was pale, but very bright and keen about the eyes. Her lips were compressed into a thin, straight line. The look of childish repose had left her face as she stood in the porch and listened.

Rebecca’s voice rose again, less shrewish, more persuasive.

“I reckon it’s no good ranting,” she said; “there’s only one thing as will make you generous, and I suppose you know what that is!”

“I reckon I do,” came the thick and lethargic response. “Pour me out some more whiskey, Becky.”

“You’ll have your own way, I suppose. Half a glass, not a drop more. Why don’t you slip into one of your chuck-me-under-the-chin moods and give me that key?”

Zeus Gildersedge’s voice seemed weaker; his voice had less edge than before.

“You leave that key alone.”

“What go you’ve got for a man of sixty!”

“You know that, eh?”

“Don’t I. Look at me; what am I here for?”

They both laughed unrestrainedly. Joan, standing in the porch, with rain dripping monotonously from the leaves, seemed to stiffen into stone. Her hands gripped the trellis of the porch. She seemed to steady herself as one who meets the onrush of some storm-driven billow or as a virgin martyr facing the flames. In these few seconds the dream-cloak had been shrivelled about her soul. She trod the furnace; fire licked her limbs. The mordant realism of life burned at last before her reason.

“I’m damned sleepy,” said the man’s voice, ending in a prolonged yawn.

“That there whiskey’s heavy stuff.”

“Where’s Joan, eh?”............