elf; but this morning there
had fallen upon him at the moment a dismaying chill. He went for a walk
on the Downs, over the great green spaces that marked no season save in
the change of the small flowers blowing in their turf. He wondered if he
would be able to find the stones he had erected that July day when he
first came here with Chator. He found what, as far as he could remember,
was the place; and he also found a group of stones that might have been
the ruins of his little monument. More remarkable than old stones now
seemed to him a Pasque anemone colored a sharp cold violet. It curiously
reminded him of the evening in March when he had walked with Lily in the
wood at Hardingham.

The peace of last night vanished in a dread of the future: Michael's
partial surrender to his mother cut at his destiny with ominous stroke.
He was in a turmoil of uncertainty, and afraid to find himself out here
on these Downs with so little achieved behind him in the city. He
hurried back to the Abbey and wrote a wild letter to Lily, declaring his
sorrow for leaving her, urging her to be patient, protesting a feverish
adoration. He wrote also to Miss Harper a hundred directions for Lily's
entertainment while he was away. He wrote to Nigel Stewart, begging him
to look after Barnes. All the time he had a sense of being pursued and
haunted; an intolerable idea that he was the quarry of an evil chase. He
could not stay at the Abbey any longer: he was being rejected by the
spirit of the place.

Dom Cuthbert was disappointed when he said he must go.

"Stay at least to-night," he urged, and Michael gave way.

He did not sleep at all that night. The alabaster image of the Blessed
Virgin kept turning to a paper thing, kept nodding at him like a zany.
He seemed to hear the Gatehouse bell clanging hour after hour. He felt
more deeply sunk in darkness than ever in Leppard Street. At daybreak he
dressed and fled through the woods, trampling under foot the primroses
limp with dew. He hurried faster and faster across the Downs; and when
the sun was up, he was standing on the platform of the railway station.
To-day he ought to have married Lily.

At Paddington, notwithstanding all that he had suffered in the parting,
unaccountably to himself he did not want to turn in the direction of
Ararat House. It puzzled him that he should drive so calmly to Cheyne
Walk.

"I think my temperature must have been a point or two up last night,"
was the explan