e den.
As I stood shuddering on the doorstep in the cold morning light,
while the whole unbearable truth broke in upon me, I could hear my
lips murmuring,

'Fool of ancestral superstitions! Fenella Stanley's fool! Philip
Aylwin's fool! Where was the besotted fool and plaything of besotted
ancestors, when the truth was burning so close beneath his eyes that
it is wonderful they were not scorched into recognising it? Where was
he when, but for superstitions grosser than those of the negroes on
the Niger banks, he might have saved the living heart and centre of
his little world? Where was the rationalist when, but for
superstitions sucked in with his mother's milk, he would have gone to
a certain studio, seen a certain picture which would have sent him on
the wings of the wind to find and rescue and watch over the one for
whom he had renounced all the ties of kindred? Where was then the
most worthy descendant of a line of ancestral idiots--Romany and
Gorgio--stretching back to the days when man's compeers, the mammoth
and the cave-bear, could have taught him better? Rushing down to
Raxton church to save her!--to save her by laying a poor little
trinket upon a dead man's breast!'

After the paroxysm of self-scorn had partly exhausted itself, I
stood staring in the woman's face.

'Well,' said she, 'I thought the shiny Quaker was a rum un, but blow
me if you ain't a rummyer.

'Her name was Winifred, and the word "father" produced fits,' I said,
not to the woman, but to my soul, in mocking answer to its own woe.
'What about my father's spiritualism now? Good God! Is there no other
ancestral tomfoolery, no other of Superstition's patent Aylwinian
soul-salves for the philosophical Nature-worshipper and apostle of
rationalism to fly to? Her name was Winifred.

'Yis; don't I say 'er name wur Winifred?' said the woman, who thought
I was addressing her. 'You're jist like a poll-parrit with your
"Winifred, Winifred, Winifred." That was 'er name, an' she 'ad a
shock, pore dear, an' it was all along of you at the studero
a-talkin' about 'er father. You _must_ a-talked about 'er father: so
no lies. She 'ad fits arter that, in course she 'ad. Why, you'll make
me die a-larfin' with your poll-parritin' ways, sayin' "a shock, a
shock, a shock," arter me. In course she 'ad a shock; she 'ad it when
she was a little gal o' six. My pore Bill (that's my 'usband as now
lives in the fine 'Straley) was a'most killed a-fightin' a Irishman.