ically to
me,' she said with deprecation.

'Why? Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their
idol was second-hand.'

She looked down and sighed; and they passed out of the crumbling old
place, and slowly crossed to the churchyard entrance. Knight was not
himself, and he could not pretend to be. She had not told all.

He supported her lightly over the stile, and was practically as
attentive as a lover could be. But there had passed away a glory, and
the dream was not as it had been of yore. Perhaps Knight was not shaped
by Nature for a marrying man. Perhaps his lifelong constraint towards
women, which he had attributed to accident, was not chance after
all, but the natural result of instinctive acts so minute as to be
undiscernible even by himself. Or whether the rough dispelling of
any bright illusion, however imaginative, depreciates the real and
unexaggerated brightness which appertains to its basis, one cannot say.
Certain it was that Knight's disappointment at finding himself second
or third in the field, at Elfride's momentary equivoque, and at her
reluctance to be candid, brought him to the verge of cynicism.

Chapter XXXIII

'O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery.'

A habit of Knight's, when not immediately occupied with Elfride--to walk
by himself for half an hour or so between dinner and bedtime--had become
familiar to his friends at Endelstow, Elfride herself among them. When
he had helped her over the stile, she said gently, 'If you wish to take
your usual turn on the hill, Harry, I can run down to the house alone.'

'Thank you, Elfie; then I think I will.'

Her form diminished to blackness in the moonlight, and Knight, after
remaining upon the churchyard stile a few minutes longer, turned back
again towards the building. His usual course was now to light a cigar or
pipe, and indulge in a quiet meditation. But to-night his mind was too
tense to bethink itself of such a solace. He merely walked round to the
site of the fallen tower, and sat himself down upon some of the
large stones which had composed it until this day, when the chain of
circumstance originated by Stephen Smith, while in the employ of Mr.
Hewby, the London man of art, had brought about its overthrow.

Pondering on the possible episodes of Elfride's past life, and on how
he had supposed her to have had no past justifying the name, he sat and
regarded the white tomb of young Jethway, now close in f