im after her, as it would have been in any other woman. The little
red-haired nurse would have known how to turn the earth and the moon
to her own purposes and his. But all the time he knew that it was not
so. There was no purpose in it at all, and it was unaware of him and
of his purposes. Gwenda's joy was pure and profound and sufficient to
itself. He gathered that it had been with her before he came and that
it would remain with her after he had gone.

He hated to think that she should know any joy that had not its
beginning and its end in him. It took her from him. As long as it
lasted he was faced with an incomprehensible and monstrous rivalry.

And as a man might leave a woman to his uninteresting rival in
the certainty that she will be bored and presently return to him,
Rowcliffe left Gwenda to the earth and moon. He sulked and was silent.

* * * * *

Then, suddenly, he made up his mind.

XXXI

It was one night in April. He had met her at the crossroads on Morfe
Green, and walked home with her by the edge of the moor. It had blown
hard all day, and now the wind had dropped, but it had left darkness
and commotion in the sky. The west was a solid mass of cloud that
drifted slowly in the wake of the departing storm, its hindmost part
shredded to mist before the path of the hidden moon.

For, mercifully, the moon was hidden. Rowcliffe knew his moment.

He meditated--the fraction of a second too long.

"I wonder----" he began.

Just then the rear of the cloud opened and cast out the moon, sheeted
in the white mist that she had torn from it.

And then, before he knew where he was, he was quarreling with Gwenda.

"Oh, look at the moon!" she cried. "All bowed forward with the cloud
wrapped round her head. Something's calling her across the sky, but
the mist holds her and the wind beats her back--look how she staggers
and charges head-downward. She's fighting the wind. And she goes--she
goes!"

"She doesn't go," said Rowcliffe. "At least you can't see her going,
and the cloud isn't wrapped round her head, it's nowhere near her. And
the wind isn't driving her, it's driving the cloud on. It's the cloud
that's going. Why can't you see things as they are?"

She was detestable to him in that moment.

"Because nobody sees them as they are. And you're spoiling the idea."

"The idea being so much more valuable than the truth."

He longed to say cruel and biting things to