He felt better at once, but realized that he must leave Penge. He changed into the serge, packed, and was soon downstairs again with a neat little story. "The sun caught me," he told Anne, "but I'd radier a worrying letter too, and I think I'd better be in town."

"Much, much better," she cried, all sympathy.

"Yes, much better," echoed Clive, who was up from the match. "We'd hoped you'd put it right yesterday, Maurice, but we quite understand, and if you must go you must go."

And old Mrs Durham had also accrued. There was to be a laughing open secret about this girl in town, who had almost accepted his offer of marriage but not quite. It didn't matter how ill he looked or how queerly he behaved, he was officially a lover, and they interpreted everything to their satisfaction and found him delightful.

Clive motored him to the station, since their ways lay to-gether that far. The drive skirted the cricket field before enter-ing the woods. Scudder was fielding now, looking reckless and graceful. He was close to them, and stamped one foot, as though summoning something. That was the final vision, and whether of a devil or a comrade Maurice had no idea. Oh, the situation was disgusting—of that he was certain, and indeed never wavered till the end of his life. But to be certain of a situation is not to be certain of a human being. Once away from

Penge he would see clearly perhaps; at all events there was Mr Lasker Jones.

"What sort of man is that keeper of yours who captained us?" he asked Clive, having tried the sentence over to himself first, to be sure it didn't sound odd.

"He's leaving this month," said Clive under the impression that he was giving a reply. Fortunately they were passing the kennels at that moment, and he added, "We shall miss him as regards the dogs, anyhow."

"But not in other ways?"

"I expect we shall do worse. One always does. Hard-working anyhow, and decidedly intelligent, whereas the man I've com-ing in his place—"; and, glad that Maurice should be interested he sketched the economy of Penge.

"Straight?" He trembled as he asked this supreme question.

"Scudder? A little too smart to be straight. However, Anne would say I'm being unfair. You can't expect our standard of honesty in servants, any more than you can expect loyalty or gratitude."

"I could never run a job like Penge," resumed Maurice after a pause. "I should never know what type of servant to select. Take Scudder for instance. What class of home does he come from? I haven't the slightest idea."

"Wasn't his father the butcher at Osmington? Yes. I think so."

Maurice flung his hat on the floor of the car with all his force. "This is about the limit," he thought, and buried both hands in his hair.

"Head rotten again?"

"Putrid."

Clive kept sympathetic silence, which neither broke until they parted; all the way Maurice sat crouched with the palms of his hands against his eyes. His whole life he had known

things but not known them—it was the great defect in his char-acter. He had known it was unsafe to return to Penge, lest some folly leapt out of the woods at him, yet he had returned. He had throbbed when Anne said, "Has she bright brown eyes?" He had known in a way it was wiser not to lean out of his bedroom window again and again into the night and call "Come!" His interior spirit was as sensitive to promptings as most men's, but he could not interpret them. Not till the crisis had come was he clear. And this tangle, so different from Cambridge, resembled it so far that too late he could trace the entanglement. Risley's room had its counterpart in the wild rose and the evening prim-roses of yesterday, the side-car dash through the fens fore-shadowed his innings at cricket.

But Cambridge had left him a hero, Penge a traitor. He had abused his host's confidence and defiled his house in his ab-sence, he had insulted Mrs Durham and Anne. And when he reached home there came a worse blow; he had also sinned ag............