decision the seeds of which had, perhaps, been planted during her former
stay among the breezy airs of Hampstead.

Felix, coming one day into his wife's study--for the house knew not the
word drawing-room--found Flora, with eyebrows lifted up and smiling lips,
listening to Sheila proclaiming the doctrine that it was impossible not
to live 'on one's own.' Nothing else--Felix learned--was compatible with
dignity, or even with peace of mind. She had, therefore, taken a back
room high up in a back street, in which she was going to live perfectly
well on ten shillings a week; and, having thirty-two pounds saved up, she
would be all right for a year, after which she would be able to earn her
living. The principle she purposed to keep before her eyes was that of
committing herself to nothing which would seriously interfere with her
work in life. Somehow, it was impossible to look at this girl, with her
glowing cheeks and her glowing eyes, and her hair frizzy from ardor, and
to distrust her utterances. Yes! She would arrive, if not where she
wanted, at all events somewhere; which, after all, was the great thing.
And in fact she did arrive the very next day in the back room high up in
the back street, and neither Tod's cottage nor the house on the
Spaniard's Road saw more than flying gleams of her, thenceforth.

Another by-product, this, of that little starting episode, the notice
given to Tryst! Strange how in life one little incident, one little
piece of living stress, can attract and gather round it the feelings,
thoughts, actions of people whose lives run far and wide away therefrom.
But episodes are thus potent only when charged with a significance that
comes from the clash of the deepest instincts.

During the six weeks which had elapsed between his return home from
Joyfields and the assizes, Felix had much leisure to reflect that if Lady
Malloring had not caused Tryst to be warned that he could not marry his
deceased wife's sister and continue to stay on the estate--the lives of
Felix himself, his daughter, mother, brother, brother's wife, their son
and daughter, and in less degree of his other brothers, would have been
free of a preoccupation little short of ludicrous in proportion to the
face value of the cause. But he had leisure, too, to reflect that in
reality the issue involved in that tiny episode concerned human existence
to its depths--for, what was it but the simple, all-important question of
human freed