was shut, and Noel stood there alone with him.

"Aren't you early, my child?" said Pierson. "You came in very quietly."

"Yes; I heard."

A slight shock went through him at the tone of her voice; her face had
that possessed look which he always dreaded. "What did you hear?" he
said.

"I heard you say: 'A judgment!' You'll say the same to me, won't you?
Only, I do want my baby."

She was standing with her back to the door, over which a dark curtain
hung; her face looked young and small against its stuff, her eyes very
large. With one hand she plucked at her blouse, just over her heart.

Pierson stared at her, and gripped the back of the chair he had been
sitting in. A lifetime of repression served him in the half-realised
horror of that moment. He stammered out the single word--

"Nollie!"

"It's quite true," she said, turned round, and went out.

Pierson had a sort of vertigo; if he had moved, he must have fallen down.
Nollie! He slid round and sank into his chair, and by some horrible
cruel fiction of his nerves, he seemed to feel Noel on his knee, as, when
a little girl, she had been wont to sit, with her fair hair fluffing
against his cheek. He seemed to feel that hair tickling his skin; it
used to be the greatest comfort he had known since her mother died. At
that moment his pride shrivelled like a flower held to a flame; all that
abundant secret pride of a father who loves and admires, who worships
still a dead wife in the children she has left him; who, humble by
nature, yet never knows how proud he is till the bitter thing happens;
all the long pride of the priest who, by dint of exhortation and
remonstrance has coated himself in a superiority he hardly suspects--all
this pride shrivelled in him. Then something writhed and cried within, as
a tortured beast cries, at loss to know why it is being tortured. How
many times has not a man used those words: "My God! My God! Why hast
Thou forsaken me!" He sprang up and tried to pace his way out of this
cage of confusion: His thoughts and feelings made the strangest medley,
spiritual and worldly--Social ostracism--her soul in peril--a trial sent
by God! The future! Imagination failed him. He went to his little
piano, opened it, closed it again; took his hat, and stole out. He
walked fast, without knowing where. It was very cold--a clear, bitter
evening. Silent rapid motion in the frosty air was some relief. As Noel
had fled from him, having