ng water--primitive, primeval, in the heart of the early morning
silence.

Many, many other pictures of those first days, but always Olva and his
father, moving together, speaking but seldom, sitting before the fire in
the evenings, watching the blaze, despising the world. The contempt that
his father had for his fellow-beings! Had a man ever been so alone? Olva
himself had drunk of that same contempt and welcomed his solitude at
Harrow. The world had been with him a place of war, of hostility, until
he had struck that blow in Sannet Wood. He remembered the eagerness with
which, at the end of term, he had hastened back to his father. After the
noise and clatter of school life how wonderful to go back to the still
sound of dripping water, to the crackle of dry leaves under foot, to
the heavy solemn tread of cattle, to those evenings when at his father's
side he heard the coals click in the fire and the old clock on the
stairs wheeze out the passing minutes. That relationship with his father
bad been, until this term, the only emotion in his life--and now? And
now!

It was incredible this change that had come to him. First there was
Margaret and then, after her, Mrs. Craven, Rupert, Lawrence, Cardillac,
Bunning. All these persons, in varying degree, bad become of concern to
him. The world that had always been a place of smoke, of wind, of sky,
was now, of a sudden, crowded with figures. He bad been swept from the
hill-top down into the market-place. He had been given perhaps one keen
glance of a moving world before he was drawn from it altogether. . . .
Now, just as he had tasted human companionship and loved it, must he
die?

He knew, too, that his recent popularity in the College had pleased him.
He wanted them to like him . . . he was proud to feel that because he
was he therefore Cardillac resigned, willingly, his place to him. But if
Cardillac knew him for a felon, knew that he might be hanged in the
dark and flung into a nameless grave, what then? If Cardillac knew what
Rupert Craven almost knew, would not his horror be the same? The world,
did it only know. . . .

To-morrow was the day of the Dublin match. Olva and Cardillac were both
playing, and at the end of the game choice might be made between them.
Did Olva care? He did not know . . . but Margaret was coming, and, in
the back of his mind, he wanted to show her what he could do.

And yet, whilst that Shadow hovered in the Outer Court, how little a
thing