ision of Whortley--a singularly vivid
vision. It was moonlight and a hillside, the little town lay lit and
warm below, and the scene was set to music, a lugubriously sentimental
air. For some reason this music had the quality of a barrel
organ--though he knew that properly it came from a band--and it
associated with itself a mystical formula of words, drawing words:--

"Sweet dreamland fa--ces, passing to and fro,
Bring back to mem'ry days of long ago--oh!"

This air not only reproduced the picture with graphic vividness, but
it trailed after it an enormous cloud of irrational emotion, emotion
that had but a moment before seemed gone for ever from his being.

He recalled it all! He had come down that hillside and Ethel had been
with him....

Had he really felt like that about her?

"Pah!" he said suddenly, and reverted to his books.

But the tune and the memory had won their footing, they were with him
through his meagre lunch of milk and scones--he had resolved at the
outset he would not go back to her for the midday meal--and on his way
to Vigours' they insisted on attention. It may be that lunching on
scone and milk does in itself make for milder ways of thinking. A
sense of extraordinary contradiction, of infinite perplexity, came to
him.

"But then," he asked, "how the devil did we get to _this_?"

Which is indeed one of the fundamental questions of matrimony.

The morning tumults had given place to an almost scientific calm. Very
soon he was grappling manfully with the question. There was no
disputing it, they had quarrelled. Not once but several times lately
they had quarrelled. It was real quarrelling;--they had stood up
against one another, striking, watching to strike, seeking to
wound. He tried to recall just how things had gone--what he had said
and what she had replied. He could not do it. He had forgotten
phrases and connexions. It stood in his memory not as a sequence of
events but as a collection of disconnected static sayings; each saying
blunt, permanent, inconsecutive like a graven inscription. And of the
scene there came only one picture--Ethel with a burning face and her
eyes shining with tears.

The traffic of a cross street engaged him for a space. He emerged on
the further side full of the vivid contrast of their changed
relations. He made a last effort to indict her, to show that for the
transition she was entirely to blame. She had quarrelled with him, she
had quarrelled de