"And when you have said them?"

She had turned out the lamp, so that she might not see his unhappy face.
She did not see it; she only saw her spiritual vision destroyed and
scattered, and the havoc of dreams, resurgent, profaning heavenly sleep.

"Please," she whispered, "please, if you love me, leave me to myself."

He left her; and her heart turned after him as he went, and blessed him.

"He is good, after all," her heart said.

But Majendie's heart had hardened. He said to himself, "She is too much
for me." As he lay awake thinking of her, he remembered Maggie. He
remembered that Maggie loved him, and that he had gone away from her
and left her, because he loved Anne. And now, because he loved Anne, he
would go to Maggie. He remembered that it was on Fridays that he used to
go and see her.

Very well, to-morrow night would be Friday night.

To-morrow night he would go and see her.

And yet, when to-morrow night came, he did not go. He never went until
December, when Maggie's postal orders left off coming. Then he knew that
Maggie was ill again. She had been fretting. He knew it; although, this
time, she had not written to tell him so.

He went, and found Maggie perfectly well. The postal orders had not come,
because the last lady, the lady with the title, had not paid her. Maggie
was good as gold again, placid and at peace.

"Why," he asked himself bitterly, "why did I not leave her to her peace?"

And a still more bitter voice answered, "Why not you, as well as anybody
else?"

BOOK III

CHAPTER XXVIII

Eastward along the Humber, past the brown wharves and the great square
blocks of the warehouses, past the tall chimneys and the docks with
their thin pine-forest of masts, there lie the forlorn flat lands of
Holderness. Field after field, they stretch, lands level as water, only
raised above the river by a fringe of turf and a belt of silt and sand.
Earth and water are of one form and of one colour, for, beyond the brown
belt, the widening river lies like a brown furrowed field, with a clayey
gleam on the crests of its furrows. When the grey days come, water and
earth and sky are one, and the river rolls sluggishly, as if shores and
sky oppressed it, as if it took its motion from the dragging clouds.

Eleven miles from Scale a thin line of red roofs runs for a field's
length up the shore, marking the neck of the estuary. It is the fishing
hamlet of Fawlness. Its one street lies on th