this stir and movement was! No tumult that the material world
could ever make could sound like that whisper that was with him now
again in the room--with him at his very heart--"All things betray Thee.
. . ."

The respite was over. Bunning came in.

Change had seized Bunning. Here now was the result of his having pulled
himself together. Olva could see that the man bad made up his mind
to something, and that, further, he was resolved to keep his purpose
secret. It was probably the first occasion in Bunning's life of such
resolution. There was a faint colour in the fat cheeks, the eyes bad a
little light and the man scarcely spoke at all lest this purpose should
trickle from his careless lips. Also as he looked at Olva his customary
devotion was heightened by an air of frightened pride.

Olva, watching him, was apprehensive--the devotion of a fool is the
most dangerous thing in creation.

"Well, have you seen Craven again?"

"Yes. We had a talk."

"What did he say?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Rot. He didn't stop and talk to you about the weather. Come on,
Bunning, what have you been up to?"

"I haven't been up to anything."

The man's lips were closed. For another half an hour Bunning sat in a
chair before the fire--silent. Every now and again he flung a glance at
Olva. Sometimes he jerked his head towards the window as though he heard
a step.

He had the look of a Christian going into the amphitheatre to face the
Beasts.

2

About eleven o'clock of the next morning Olva went to see Margaret. He
had written to her the night before and asked her not to tell Rupert
the news of their engagement immediately, but, when the morning came, he
could not rest with that. He must know more.

It was a damp, misty morning, the fine frost had gone. He was going to
Margaret to try and recover some reality out of the state that he was
in. The recent incidents--Craven's suspicions, the 5th of November
evening, Bunning's alarm, the scene with Margaret--bad dragged him for
a time from that conviction that he was living in an unreal world. That
day when he had run in the snowstorm from Sannet Wood had seemed to him,
during these last weeks, absurd and an effect, obviously, of excited
nerves. Now, on this morning of the Dublin match, he awoke again to
that unreal condition. The bedmaker, the men passing through the Court
beneath his windows, the porter at the gate--these people were unreal,
and above him, around him, the mist see