e at Whitebeck."

He looked at her in distress, yet also in anger. A friend might surely
have stood by him more cordially, believed in him more simply.

"You are at home again? I may come and see you."

"Please! We shall want to hear."

Her tone was embarrassed. They parted almost coldly.

Lydia walked quickly home, down a sloping lane from which the ravines of
Blencathra, edge behind edge, chasm beyond chasm, were to be seen against
the sunset, and all the intermediate landscape--wood, and stubble, and
ferny slope--steeped in stormy majesties of light. But for once the quick
artist sense was shut against Nature's spectacles. She walked in a blind
anguish of self-knowledge and self-scorn. She who had plumed herself on
the poised mind, the mastered senses!

She moaned to herself.

"Why didn't he tell me--warn me! To sell himself to that man--to act for
him--defend him--apologize for him--and for those awful, awful things! An
agent must."

And she thought of some indignant talk of Undershaw, which she had heard
that morning.

Her moral self was full of repulsion; her heart was torn. Friend? She
owned her weakness, and despised it. Turning aside, she leant a while
against a gate, hiding her face from the glory of the evening. Week by
week--she knew it now!--through that frank interchange of mind with mind,
of heart with heart, represented by that earlier correspondence, still
more perhaps through the checks and disappointments of its later phases,
Claude Faversham had made his way into the citadel.

The puny defences she had built about the freedom of her maiden life and
will lay in ruins. Her theories were scattered like the autumn leaves
that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened
bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore
accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now
delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion
she must needs divine--of these various impressions, small and great, she
was the struggling captive. Serenity, peace were gone.

Meanwhile, as Faversham rode toward the Tower, absorbed at one moment in
a misery of longing, and the next in a heat of self-defence, perhaps the
strongest feeling that finally emerged was one of dismay that her
abrupt leave-taking had prevented him from telling her of that other
matter of which Tatham's visit had informed him. She must hear of it
immediately, and from tho