ble decision, and Gillian, feeling that it would
be useless to urge her further at the moment, went slowly out of the
room and upstairs. As she went she could hear Dan's footstep in the
passage below. It sounded tired--quite unlike his usual swinging stride
with its suggestion of impetuous force.

But it was not work that had tired Dan Storran that afternoon. When he
had quitted the little party gathered beneath the elms, he had started
off across the fields, unheeding where he went, and for hours he had
been tramping, deaf and blind to the world around him, immersed in the
thoughts that had driven him forth.

The full significance of the last few weeks had suddenly come home to
him. Till now he had been drifting--drifting unthinkingly, conscious
only that life had become extraordinarily full of interest and of a
breathless kind of happiness, half sweet, half bitter. Bitter when Magda
was not with him, sweet with a maddening sweetness when she was.

He had not stopped to consider what it all meant--why the dull,
monotonous round of existence on the farm to which he had long grown
accustomed should all at once have come alive--grown vibrant and quick
with some new impulse.

But the happenings of to-day had suddenly shown him where he stood. That
revealing moment by the river's edge with Magda, the swift, unreasoning
jealousy of Davilof which had run like fire through his veins--jealousy
because the other man was so evidently an old acquaintance with prior
rights in her which seemed to set him, Dan Storran, quite outside the
circle of their intimacy--had startled him into recognition of how far
he had drifted.

He loved her--craved for her with every fibre of his being. She was his
woman, and beside the tumultuous demand for her of all his lusty manhood
the quiet, unexacting affection which he bore his wife was as water is
to wine.

And since in Dan's simple code of ethics a man's loyalty to his wife
occupied a very definite and unassailable position, the realisation came
to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did
he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he
tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love
which had come to him was a forbidden thing--a thing which must be
fought and thrust outside his life. For the sake of June he must see no
more of Magda. She must go--leave Stockleigh. Afterwards he would tear
the very memory of her out of