ss could but destroy them both! The notion that he was going to
make her his mistress--that simple child not yet eighteen--now filled him
with a sort of horror, even while it still stung and whipped his blood.
He muttered to himself: "It's awful, what I've done--awful!" And the
sound of Schumann's music throbbed and mingled with his fevered thoughts,
and he saw again Stella's cool, white, fair-haired figure and bending
neck, the queer, angelic radiance about her. 'I must have been--I must
be-mad!' he thought. 'What came into me? Poor little Megan!' "God
bless us all, and Mr. Ashes!" "I want to be with you--only to be with
you!" And burying his face in his pillow, he smothered down a fit of
sobbing. Not to go back was awful! To go back--more awful still!

Emotion, when you are young, and give real vent to it, loses its power of
torture. And he fell asleep, thinking: 'What was it--a few kisses--all
forgotten in a month!'

Next morning he got his cheque cashed, but avoided the shop of the
dove-grey dress like the plague; and, instead, bought himself some
necessaries. He spent the whole day in a queer mood, cherishing a kind
of sullenness against himself. Instead of the hankering of the last two
days, he felt nothing but a blank--all passionate longing gone, as if
quenched in that outburst of tears. After tea Stella put a book down
beside him, and said shyly:

"Have you read that, Frank?"

It was Farrar's "Life of Christ." Ashurst smiled. Her anxiety about his
beliefs seemed to him comic, but touching. Infectious too, perhaps, for
he began to have an itch to justify himself, if not to convert her. And
in the evening, when the children and Halliday were mending their
shrimping nets, he said:

"At the back of orthodox religion, so far as I can see, there's always
the idea of reward--what you can get for being good; a kind of begging
for favours. I think it all starts in fear."

She was sitting on the sofa making reefer knots with a bit of string. She
looked up quickly:

"I think it's much deeper than that."

Ashurst felt again that wish to dominate.

"You think so," he said; "but wanting the 'quid pro quo' is about the
deepest thing in all of us! It's jolly hard to get to the bottom of it!"

She wrinkled her brows in a puzzled frown.

"I don't think I understand."

He went on obstinately:

"Well, think, and see if the most religious people aren't those who feel
that this life doesn't give t