more than I thought," he
said to himself with a wistful smile. "I am sorry," and again as the
sparks died out from the black ashes of the letter he repeated: "Poor
little girl. I am very sorry."

So the house would always be silent and empty.

Sylvia had written the letter in haste on the very evening of Chayne's
visit, and had hurried out to post it in fear lest she might change her
mind in the morning. But in the morning she was only aware of a great
lightness of spirit. She could now devote herself to the work of her
life; and for two long tiring days she kept Walter Hine at her side. But
now he sought to avoid her. The little energy he had ever had was gone,
he alternated between exhilaration and depression; he preferred, it
seemed, to be alone. For two days, however, Sylvia persevered, and on the
third her lightness of spirit unaccountably deserted her.

She drove with Walter Hine that morning, and something of his own
irritability seemed to have passed into her; so that he turned to her
and asked:

"What have I done? Aren't you pleased with me? Why are you angry?"

"I am not angry," she replied, turning her great gray eyes upon him. "But
if you wish to know, I miss something."

So much she owned. She missed something, and she knew very well what it
was that she missed. Even as Chayne in his Sussex home had ached to know
that the house lacked a particular presence, so it began to be with
Sylvia in Dorsetshire.

"Yet he has been absent for a longer time," she argued with herself, "and
I have not missed him. Indeed, I have been glad of his absence." And the
answer came quickly from her thoughts.

"At any time you could have called him to your side, and you knew it. Now
you have sent him away for always."

During the week the sense of loss, the feeling that everything was
unbearably incomplete, grew stronger and stronger within her. She had no
heart for the losing battle in which she was engaged. A dangerous
question began to force itself forward in her mind whenever her eyes
rested upon Walter Hine. "Was he worth while?" she asked herself: though
as yet she did not define all that the "while" connoted. The question was
most prominent in her mind on the seventh day after the letter had been
sent. She had persuaded Walter Hine to mount with her on to the down
behind the house; they came to the great White Horse, and Hine, pleading
fatigue, a plea which during these last days had been ever on his lips,
flung