ness to fling it away. He FELT that he would never
overcome his passion, but he KNEW that after all it was only a matter
of time.

He would not stay in London. There everything reminded him of his
unhappiness. He telegraphed to his uncle that he was coming to
Blackstable, and, hurrying to pack, took the first train he could. He
wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in which he had endured so much
suffering. He wanted to breathe clean air. He was disgusted with himself.
He felt that he was a little mad.

Since he was grown up Philip had been given the best spare room at the
vicarage. It was a corner-room and in front of one window was an old tree
which blocked the view, but from the other you saw, beyond the garden and
the vicarage field, broad meadows. Philip remembered the wall-paper from
his earliest years. On the walls were quaint water colours of the early
Victorian period by a friend of the Vicar's youth. They had a faded charm.
The dressing-table was surrounded by stiff muslin. There was an old
tall-boy to put your clothes in. Philip gave a sigh of pleasure; he had
never realised that all those things meant anything to him at all. At the
vicarage life went on as it had always done. No piece of furniture had
been moved from one place to another; the Vicar ate the same things, said
the same things, went for the same walk every day; he had grown a little
fatter, a little more silent, a little more narrow. He had become
accustomed to living without his wife and missed her very little. He
bickered still with Josiah Graves. Philip went to see the churchwarden. He
was a little thinner, a little whiter, a little more austere; he was
autocratic still and still disapproved of candles on the altar. The shops
had still a pleasant quaintness; and Philip stood in front of that in
which things useful to seamen were sold, sea-boots and tarpaulins and
tackle, and remembered that he had felt there in his childhood the thrill
of the sea and the adventurous magic of the unknown.

He could not help his heart beating at each double knock of the postman in
case there might be a letter from Mildred sent on by his landlady in
London; but he knew that there would be none. Now that he could think it
out more calmly he understood that in trying to force Mildred to love him
he had been attempting the impossible. He did not know what it was that
passed from a man to a woman, from a woman to a man, and made one of them
a slave: it was co