fit to count as in the lists, to have heard her say
the thing of a rival would have been hard enough, but base, degenerate,
and of the world behind her day, to hear it while frenzied for her, was
intolerable. And it was Mount Dunstan she bore herself so highly for.
Whether melodrama is out of date or not there are, occasionally, some
fine melodramatic touches in the enmities of to-day.

"You think you will reach him," he persisted. "You think you will help
him in some way. You will not let the thing alone."

"Excuse my mentioning that whatsoever I take the liberty of doing will
encroach on no right of yours," she said.

But, alone in her room, after she went upstairs, the face reflecting
itself in the mirror was pale and its black brows were drawn together.

She sat down at the dressing-table, and, seeing the paled face, drew the
black brows closer, confronting a complicating truth.

"If I were free to take Rosalie and Ughtred home to-morrow," she
thought, "I could not bear to go. I should suffer too much."

She was suffering now. The strong longing in her heart was like
a physical pain. No word or look of this one man had given
her proof that his thoughts turned to her, and yet it was
intolerable--intolerable--that in his hour of stress and need they were
as wholly apart as if worlds rolled between them. At any dire moment it
was mere nature that she should give herself in help and support. If, on
the night at sea, when they had first spoken to each other, the ship
had gone down, she knew that they two, strangers though they were, would
have worked side by side among the frantic people, and have been among
the last to take to the boats. How did she know? Only because, he being
he, and she being she, it must have been so in accordance with the
laws ruling entities. And now he stood facing a calamity almost as
terrible--and she with full hands sat still.

She had seen the hop pickers' huts and had recognised their condition.
Mere brick sheds in which the pickers slept upon bundles of hay or straw
in their best days; in their decay they did not even provide shelter. In
fine weather the hop gatherers slept well enough in them, cooking their
food in gypsy-fashion in the open. When the rain descended, it must
run down walls and drip through the holes in the roofs in streams which
would soak clothes and bedding. The worst that Nigel and Mrs. Brent had
implied was true. Illness of any order, under such circumstances, wou