In order to catch the Liverpool steamer at Douglas it was necessary to leave Port Erin at half-past six in the morning. The freshness of the morning, and the smiles of the Alderman and his wife as they waved God-speed from the doorstep, filled Anna with a content which she certainly had not felt during the wakeful night. She forgot, then, the hours passed with her conscience in realising how serious and solemn a thing was this engagement, made in an instant on the previous evening. All that remained in her mind, as she and Henry walked quickly down the road, was the sensation of high resolves to be a wife. The duties, rather than the joys, of her condition, had lain nearest her heart until that moment of setting out, giving her an anxious and almost worried which at breakfast neither Henry nor the Suttons could quite understand. But now the idea of duty ceased for a time to be , and she loosed herself to the pleasures of the day in store. The harbour was full of low wandering mists, through which the brown sails of the fishing-smacks played at hide-and-seek. High above them the round forms of immense clouds were still carrying the colours of sunrise. The gentle salt wind on the cheek was like the touch of a life-giver. It was impossible, on such a morning, not to in life, not to laugh childishly from glee, not to dismiss the memory of grief and the of grief as hallucinations. Mynor's face expressed the double happiness of present and anticipated pleasure. He had once again succeeded, he who had never failed; and the voyage back to England was for him a triumphal progress. Anna responded eagerly to his mood. The day was an , a bright expanse unstained. To Anna in particular it was a unique day, marking the of her existence. In the years that followed she could always return to it and say to herself: 'That day I was happy, foolishly, ignorantly, but . And all that I have since learnt cannot alter it—I was happy.'  
When they reached Shawport Station a cab was waiting for Anna. Unknown to her, Henry had ordered it by telegraph. This considerateness was of a piece, she thought, with his masterly conduct of the entire journey—on the steamer, at Liverpool, in the train; nothing that an experienced traveller could devise had been lacking to her comfort. She got into the cab alone, while Mynors, followed by a boy and his bag, walked to his rooms in Mount Street. It had been arranged, at Anna's wish, that he should not appear at Terrace till supper-time. Ephraim opened for her the door of her home. It seemed to her that he was pleased.
 
'Well, father, here I am again, you see.'
 
'Ay, lass.' They shook hands, and she indicated to the cabman where to deposit her tin-box. She was glad and relieved to be back. Nothing had changed, except herself, and this absolute sameness was at once pleasant and pathetic to her.
 
'Where's Agnes?' she asked, smiling at her father. In the glow of arrival she had a vague notion that her relations with him had been by absence.
 
'I see thou's gotten into th' habit o' flitting about in cabs,' he said, without answering her question.
 
'Well, father,' she said, smiling yet, 'there was the box. I couldn't carry the box.'
 
'I reckon thou couldst ha' hired a lad to carry it for sixpence.'
 
She did not reply. The cabman had gone to his vehicle.
 
'Art'na going to pay th' cabby?'
 
'I've paid him, father.'
 
'How much?'
 
She paused. 'Eighteen-pence, father.' It was a lie; she had paid two shillings.
 
She went eagerly into the kitchen, and then into the parlour, where tea was set for one. Agnes was not there. 'Her's upstairs,' Ephraim said, meeting Anna as she came into the lobby again. She ran softly upstairs, and into the bedroom. Agnes was replacing on the mantelpiece with mathematical exactitude; under her arm was a duster. The child turned, startled, and gave a little .
 
'Eh, I didn't know you'd come. How early you are!'
 
They rushed towards each other, embraced, and kissed. Anna was overcome by the of her sister's loneliness in that grim house for fourteen days, while she, the elder, had been absorbed in selfish gaiety. The pale face, large, eyes, and long, thin arms, were a silent . She wondered that she could ever have brought herself to leave Agnes even for a day. Sitting down on the bed, she drew the child on her knee in a fury of love, and kissed her again, weeping. Agnes cried too, for sympathy.
 
'Oh, my dear, dear Anna, I'm so glad you've come back!' She dried her eyes, and in quite a different tone of voice asked: 'Has Mr. Mynors proposed to you?'
 
Anna could not avoid a blush at this simple and . She said: 'Yes.' It was the one word of which she was capable, under the circumstances. That was not the moment to tax Agnes with too much and .
 
'You're engaged, then? Oh, Anna, does it feel nice? It must. I knew you would be!'
 
'How did you know, Agnes?'
 
'I mean I knew he would ask you, some time. All the girls at school knew too.'
 
'I hope you didn't talk about it,' said the elder sister.
 
'Oh, no! But they did; they were always talking about it.'
 
'You never told me that.'
 
'I—I didn't like to. Anna, shall I have to call him Henry now?'
 
'Yes, of course. When we're married he will be your brother-in-law.'
 
'Shall you be married soon, Anna?'
 
'Not for a very long time.'
 
'When you are—shall I keep house alone? I can, you know—— I shall never dare to call him Henry. But he's nice; isn't he, Anna? Yes, when you are married, I shall keep house here, but I shall come to see you every day. Father will have to let me do that. Does father know you're engaged?'
 
'Not yet. And you mustn't say anything. Henry is coming for supper. And then father will be told.'
 
'Did he kiss you, Anna?'
 
'Who—father?'
 
'No, silly! Henry, of course—I mean when he'd asked you?'
 
'I think you are asking all the questions. Suppose I ask you some now. How have you managed with father? Has he been nice?'
 
'Some days—yes,' said Agnes, after thinking a moment. 'We have had some new cups and saucers up from Mr. Mynors works. And father has swept the kitchen chimney. And, oh Anna! I asked him to-day if I'd kept house well, and he said "Pretty well," and he gave me a penny. Look! It's the first money I've ever had, you know. I wanted you at nights, Anna—and all the time, too. I've been frightfully busy. I cleaned silvers all afternoon. Anna, I have tried—— And I've got some tea for you. I'll go down and make it. Now you mustn't come into the kitchen. I'll bring it to you in the parlour.'
 
'I had my tea at Crewe,' Anna was about to say, but refrained, in due course drinking the cup prepared by Agnes. She felt sorry for Agnes, too young to feel the shadow which overhung her future. Anna would marry into freedom, but Agnes would remain the serf. Would Agnes marry? Could she? Would her father allow it? Anna had noticed that in families the youngest, petted in childhood, was often sacrificed in . It was the last maid who must keep her , and, vicariously filial, pay out of her own life the debt of all the rest.
 
'Mr. Mynors is coming up for supper to-night. He wants to see you;' Anna said to her father, as calmly as she could. The . But at eight o'clock, the hour for supper, Henry had not arrived. The meal proceeded, of course, without him. To Anna his absence was unaccountable and disturbing, for none could be more than he in the matter of appointments. She expected him every moment, but he did not appear. Agnes, filled full of the great secret to her, was more openly impatient than her sister. Neither of them could talk, and a heavy silence fell upon the family group, a silence which her father, on that particular evening of Anna's return, resented.
 
'You dunna' tell us much,' he remarked, when the supper was finished.
 
She felt that the complaint was a just one. Even before supper, when nothing had occurred to her, she had spoken little. There had seemed so much to tell—at Port Erin, and now there seemed nothing to tell. She ventured into a flaccid, perfunctory account of Beatrice's illness, of the fishing, of the unfinished houses which had caught the fancy of Mr. Sutton; she said the sea had been smooth, that they had had something to eat at Liverpool, that the train for Crewe was very prompt; and then she could think of no more. Silence fell again. The supper-things were cleared away and washed up. At a quarter-past nine, Agnes, vainly begging permission to stay up in order to see Mr. Mynors, was sent to bed, only comforted by a clothes-brush, long desired, which Anna had brought for her as a present from the of Man.
 
'Shall you tell father yourself, now Henry hasn't come?' the child asked Anna, who had gone upstairs to her box.
 
'Yes,' said Anna, .
 
'I wonder what he'll say,' Agnes reflected, with that habit, always annoying to Anna, of meeting trouble half-way.
 
At a quarter to ten Anna ceased to expect Mynors, and finally herself to the of a solemn interview with her father, well knowing that she dared not leave him any longer in ignorance of her engagement. Already the old man was locking and bolting the door; he had wound up the kitchen clock. When he came back to the parlour to extinguish the gas she was by the mantelpiece.
 
'Father,' she began, 'I've something I must tell you.'
 
'Eh, what's that ye say?' his hand was on the gas-tap. He dropped it, examining her face .
 
'Mr. Mynors has asked me to marry him; he asked me last night. We settled he should come up to-night to see you—I can't think why he hasn't. It must be something very unexpected and important, or he'd have come.' She trembled, her heart beat violently; but the words were out, and she thanked God.
 
'Asked ye to marry him, did he?' The miser gazed at her quizzically out of his small blue eyes.
 
'Yes, father.'
 
'And what didst say?'
 
'I said I would.'
 
'Oh! Thou saidst thou wouldst! I reckon it was for thatten as thou must go off to seaside, eh?'
 
'Father, I never dreamt of such a thing when Suttons asked me to go. I do wish Henry'—the cost of that name!—'had come. He quite meant to come to-night.' She could not help insisting on the of Henry's intentions.
 
'Then I am for be consulted, eh?'
 
'Of course, father.'
 
'Ye've soon made it up, between ye.'
 
His tone was, at the best, brusque; but she breathed more easily, divining instantly from his manner that he meant to offer no violent objection to the engagement. She knew that only was needed now. The miser had, indeed, foreseen the possibility of this marriage for months past, and had long since in his own mind that Henry would make a satisfactory son-in-law. Ephraim had no social ambitions—with all his meanness, he was above them; he had nothing but contempt for rank, style, luxury, and 'the theory of what it is to be a lady and a gentleman.' Yet, by a curious contradiction, Henry's smartness of appearance—the smartness of an unrivalled commercial traveller—pleased him. He saw in Henry a young and man of shrewdness, a man who had saved money, had made money for others, and was now making it for himself; a man who could be trusted absolutely to perform that of 'getting on'; a 'safe' and profoundly respectable man, at the same time audacious and . He was well aware that Henry had really fallen in love with Anna, but nothing would have convinced him that Anna's money was not the cause of Henry's genuine passion for Anna's self.
 
'You like Henry, don't you, father?' Anna said. It was a failure in the desired tact, for Ephraim had never been known to admit that he liked anyone or anything. Such natures are capable of nothing more positive than toleration.
 
'He's a hard-headed chap, and he knows the value o' money. Ay! that he does; he knows which side his bread's buttered on.' A emphasis marked the last sentence.
 
Instead of remaining silent, Anna, in her nervousness, committed another imprudence. 'What do you mean, father?' she asked, pretending that she thought it impossible he could mean what he obviously did mean.
 
'Thou knows what I'm at, lass. Dost think he isna' marrying thee for thy ? Dost think as he canna' make a fine guess what thou'rt worth? But that wunna' bother thee as long as thou'st hooked a good-looking chap.'
 
'Father!'
 
'Ay! thou mayst ; but it's true. Dunna' tell me.'
 
Securely conscious of the perfect purity of Mynors' affection, she was not in the least hurt. She even thought that her father's attitude was not quite sincere, an attitude partially due to churlishness. 'Henry has never even mentioned money to me,' she said mildly.
 
'Happen not; he isna' such a fool as that.' He paused, and continued: 'Thou'rt free to , for me. Lasses will do it, I reckon, and thee among th' rest.' She smiled, and on that smile he suddenly turned out the gas. Anna was glad that the had ended so well. Congratulations, , loving regard for her welfare: she had not expected these things, and was in no wise grieved by their absence. Groping her way towards the lobby, she considered herself lucky, and only wished that nothing had happened to keep Mynors away. She wanted to tell him at once that her father had proved .
 
 
The next morning, Tellwright, whose attendance at was losing the strictness of its old , announced that he should stay at home. Sunday's dinner was to be a cold repast, and so Anna and Agnes went to chapel. Anna's thoughts were wholly occupied with the of seeing Mynors, and hearing the explanation of his absence on Saturday night.
 
'There he is!' Agnes exclaimed loudly, as they were approaching the chapel.
 
'Agnes,' said Anna, 'when will you learn to behave in the street?'
 
Mynors stood at the chapel-gates; he was evidently awaiting them. He looked grave, almost sad. He raised his hat and shook hands, with a particular for Agnes, who was speculating whether he would kiss Anna, as his , or herself, as being only a little girl, or both or neither of them. Her eyes already expressed a sort of ownership in him.
 
'I should like to speak to you a moment,' Henry said. 'Will you come into the school-yard?'
 
'Agnes, you had better go straight into chapel,' said Anna. It was an disaster to the child, but she obeyed.
 
'I didn't give you up last night till nearly ten o'clock,' Anna remarked as they passed into the school-yard. She was astonished to discover in herself an to , to play the offended fair one, because Mynors had failed in his appointment. Contemptuously she crushed it.
 
'Have you heard about Mr. Price?' Mynors began.
 
'No. What about him? Has anything happened?'
 
'A very sad thing has happened. Yes——' He stopped, from emotion. 'Our has committed suicide!'
 
'Killed himself?' Anna .
 
'He hanged himself yesterday afternoon at Edward Street, in the slip-house after the works were closed. Willie had gone home, but he came back, when his father didn't turn up for dinner, and found him. Mr. Price was quite dead. He ran in to my place to fetch me just as I was getting my tea. That was why I never came last night.'
 
Anna was speechless.
 
'I thought I would tell you myself,' Henry resumed. 'It's an awful thing for the Sunday-school, and the whole society, too. He, a prominent Wesleyan, a worker among us! An awful thing!' he repeated, dominated by the idea of the blow thus dealt to the Methodist connexion by the man now dead.
 
'Why did he do it?' Anna demanded, .
 
Mynors his shoulders, and ejaculated: 'Business troubles, I suppose; it couldn't be anything else. At school this morning I simply announced that he was dead.' Henry's voice broke, but he added, after a pause: 'Young Price bore himself splendidly last night.'
 
Anna turned away in silence. 'I shall come up for tea, if I may,' Henry said, and then they parted, he to the singing-seat, she to the of the chapel. People were talking in groups on the broad steps and in the vestibule. All knew of the , and had received from it a new interest in life. The town was aroused as if from a lethargy. and eager curiosity were on every face. Those who arrived in ignorance of the event were informed of it in impressive tones, and with intense satisfaction to the informer; nothing of equal importance had happened in the society for decades. Anna walked up the to her pew, filled with one thought:
 
'We drove him to it, father and I.'
 
Her fear was that the miser had renewed his terrible during the previous fortnight. She forgot that she had disliked the dead man, that he had always seemed to her mean, pietistic, and two-faced. She forgot that in pressing him for rent many months she and her father had acted within their just rights—acted as Price himself would have acted in their place. She could think only of the strain, the agony, the despair that must have preceded the tragedy. Old Price had for all in one sin, the sole deed that could lend dignity and to such a figure as his. Anna's imagination reconstituted the scene in the slip-house: she saw it as something grand, accusing, and unanswerable; and she could not dismiss a feeling of acute that she should have been engaged in pleasure at that very hour of death. Surely some instinct should have warned her that the hare which she had helped to hunt was at its last !
 
Mr. Sargent, the newly-appointed second minister, was in the pulpit—a little, earnest bachelor, who emphasised every sentence with a continual of the voice. 'Brethren,' he said, after the second —and his tones vibrated with a singular effect through the half-empty building: 'Before I proceed to my sermon I have one word to say in reference to the awful event which is doubtless uppermost in the minds of all of you. It is not for us to judge the man who is now gone from us, into the presence of his with the crime of self-murder upon his soul. I say it is not for us to judge him. The ways of the are past finding out. Therefore at such a moment we may fitly ourselves before the Throne, and while there let us for the poor young man who is left behind, , and full of grief and shame. We will engage in silent prayer.' He lifted his hand, and closed his eyes, and the congregation leaned forward against the fronts of the pews. The appealing face of Willie presented itself to Anna.
 
'Who is it?' Agnes asked, in a whisper of distinctness. Anna frowned angrily, and gave no reply.
 
While the last hymn was being sung, Anna signed to Agnes that she wished to leave the chapel. Everyone would be aware that she was among Price's , and she feared that if she stayed till the end of the service some chatterer might draw her into a conversation. The sisters went out, and Agnes's burning curiosity was at length relieved.
 
'Mr. Price has hanged himself,' Anna said to her father when they reached home.
 
The miser looked through the window for a moment. 'I am na' surprised,' he said. 'Suicide's i' that blood. Titus's uncle 'Lijah tried to kill himself twice afore he died o' . Us'n have to do summat wi' Edward Street at last.'
 
She wanted to ask Ephraim if he had been demanding more rent lately, but she could not find courage to do so.
 
Agnes had to go to Sunday-school alone that afternoon. Without saying anything to her father, Anna decided to stay at home. She spent the time in her bedroom, idle, ; and did not come downstairs till half-past three. Ephraim had gone out. Agnes presently returned, and then Henry came in with Mr. Tellwright. They were , and Anna knew that her engagement was finally and satisfactorily settled. During tea no reference was made to it, nor to the suicide. Mynors' demeanour was quiet but cheerful. He had partly recovered from the morning's , and gave Ephraim and Agnes a account of the attractions of Port Erin. Anna noticed the amusement in his eyes when Agnes, reddening, said to him: 'Will you have some more bread-and-butter, Henry?' It seemed to be tacitly understood afterwards that Agnes and her father would attend chapel, while Henry and Anna kept house. No one was ingenious enough to detect an impropriety in the arrangement. For some obscure reason, immediately upon the departure of the chapel-goers, Anna went into the kitchen, some plates, stroked her hair mechanically, and then stole back again to the parlour. It was a evening, and instead of walking up and down the strip of garden the betrothed lovers sat together under the window. Anna wondered whether or not she was happy. The presence of Mynors was, at any rate, marvellously .
 
'Did your father say anything about the Price affair?' he began, yielding at once to the powerful hypnotism of the subject which fascinated the whole town that night, and which Anna could bear neither to discuss nor to ignore.
 
'Not much,' she said, and repeated to him her father's remark.
 
Mynors told her all he knew; how Willie had discovered his father with his toes actually the floor, leaning slightly forward, quite dead; how he had then cut the rope and fetched Mynors, who went with him to the police-station; how they had tied up the head of the , and then waited till night to wheel the body on a hand-cart from Edward Street to the mortuary at the police-station; how the police had telephoned to the coroner, and settled at once that the inquest should be held on Tuesday in the court-room at the town-hall; and how quiet, self-contained, and Willie had been, surprising everyone by this new-found . It all seemed real to Anna, as Henry added detail to detail.
 
'I think I ought to tell you,' she said very calmly, when he had finished the , 'that I—I'm dreadfully upset over it. I can't help thinking that I—that father and I, I mean—are somehow partly responsible for this.'
 
'For Price's death? How?'
 
'We have been so hard on him for his rent lately, you know.'
 
'My dearest girl! What next?' He took her hand in his. 'I assure you the idea is absurd. You've only got it because you're so sensitive and high-strung. I undertake to say Price was stuck fast everywhere—everywhere—hadn't a chance.'
 
'Me high-strung!' she exclaimed. He kissed her lovingly. But, beneath the feeling of , which by superior force he had imposed on her, there lay a feeling that she was treated like a frightened child who must be tranquillized in the night. Nevertheless, she was grateful for his kindness, and when she went to bed she obtained relief from the returning of the suicide by making anew her to him.
 
As a effect the death of Titus Price could scarcely have been surpassed. The town was profoundly moved by the spectacle of this yet heroic surrender of all those by which society to tolerate itself. Here was a man whom no one respected, but everyone pretended to respect—who knew that he was respected by none, but pretended that he was respected by all; whose whole career was made up of dissimulations: religious, moral, and social. If any man could have been trusted to continue the decent to the end, and so preserve the general self-esteem, surely it was this man. But no! Suddenly abandoning all , he openly, ; and, snatching a bit of cries: ' me; this is real human nature. This is the truth; the rest was lies. I lied; you lied. I confess it, and you shall confess it.' Such a thunderclap shakes the very base of the microcosm. The young folk in particular could with difficulty believe their ears. It seemed incredible to them that Titus Price, the Methodist, the Sunday-school superintendent, the loud champion of the highest , should commit the sin of all sins—murder. They were dazed. The remembrance of his insincerity did nothing to the blow. In their view it was perhaps even worse that he had played false to his own falsity. The elders were a little less disturbed. The event was not unique in their experience. They had lived longer and felt these shocks before. They could go back into the past and find other cases where a swift impulse had shattered the of a lifetime. They knew that the history of families and of communities is crowded with . They had discovered that character is changeless, irrepressible, . They were aware of the astonishing fact, which takes at least thirty years to learn, that a Sunday-school superintendent is a man. And the suicide of Titus Price, when they had realised it, served but to confirm their most secret and honest estimate of humanity, that estimate which they never confided to a soul. The young folk thought the Methodist Society shamed and branded by the incident, and imagined that years must elapse before it could again hold up its head in the town. The old folk were wiser, foreseeing with certainty that in only a few days this all-engrossing phenomenon would lose its significance, and be as though it had never been. Even in two days, time had already begun its work, for by Tuesday morning the interest of the affair—on Sunday at the highest pitch—had so much that the thought of the inquest was capable of reviving it. Although everyone knew that the case presented no unusual features, and that the coroner's would be nothing more than a formal ceremony, the almost greedy curiosity of Methodist circles lifted it to the level of a cause célèbre. The court was filled with respectability when the coroner drove into the town, and each face said to its fellow: 'So you're here, are you?' Late comers of the official world—councillors, of the poor, members of the school board, and one or two of their ladies, were forced to for room with the police and the town-hall keeper, and, having succeeded, sank into their narrow seats with a sigh of and triumph. Late comers with less influence had to retire, and by a kind of sinister were kept wandering about the corridor before they could decide to go home. The market-place was occupied by hundreds of loafers, who seemed to find a mystic satisfaction in the coroner's dogcart and the of the building which now held the corpse.
 
It was by accident that Anna was in the town. She knew that the inquest was to occur that morning, but had not dreamed of attending it. When, however, she saw the stir of excitement in the market-place, and the police guarding the entrances of the town-hall, she walked directly across the road, past the two officers at the east door, and into the dark main corridor of the building, which was dotted with small groups idly conversing. She was conscious of two things: a curiosity, and the existence somewhere in the precincts of a dead body, unsightly, , calm, silent, careless—the insensible origin of all this simmering which disgusted her even while she shared in it. At a small door, half hidden by a curtain, she was startled to see Mynor............