oming up the path, and wanted to learn if she were not
one of them. Can I help disliking her if I think of the past? Can I
help watching her if I remember my boy? Can I help ill-wishing her if I
well-wish him?'

The bowed form went on, passed through the wicket, and was enveloped by
the shadows of the field.

Stephen had heard that Mrs. Jethway, since the death of her son, had
become a crazed, forlorn woman; and bestowing a pitying thought
upon her, he dismissed her fancied wrongs from his mind, but not her
condemnation of Elfride's faithlessness. That entered into and mingled
with the sensations his new experience had begotten. The tale told by
the little scene he had witnessed ran parallel with the unhappy woman's
opinion, which, however baseless it might have been antecedently, had
become true enough as regarded himself.

A slow weight of despair, as distinct from a violent paroxysm as
starvation from a mortal shot, filled him and wrung him body and soul.
The discovery had not been altogether unexpected, for throughout his
anxiety of the last few days since the night in the churchyard, he had
been inclined to construe the uncertainty unfavourably for himself. His
hopes for the best had been but periodic interruptions to a chronic fear
of the worst.

A strange concomitant of his misery was the singularity of its form.
That his rival should be Knight, whom once upon a time he had adored
as a man is very rarely adored by another in modern times, and whom
he loved now, added deprecation to sorrow, and cynicism to both. Henry
Knight, whose praises he had so frequently trumpeted in her ears, of
whom she had actually been jealous, lest she herself should be lessened
in Stephen's love on account of him, had probably won her the more
easily by reason of those very praises which he had only ceased to utter
by her command. She had ruled him like a queen in that matter, as in
all others. Stephen could tell by her manner, brief as had been his
observation of it, and by her words, few as they were, that her position
was far different with Knight. That she looked up at and adored her new
lover from below his pedestal, was even more perceptible than that she
had smiled down upon Stephen from a height above him.

The suddenness of Elfride's renunciation of himself was food for more
torture. To an unimpassioned outsider, it admitted of at least two
interpretations--it might either have proceeded from an endeavour to be
faithful