is hand in the cubicle, and the
odour of her flesh that was like fruit. His cursed constancy! ...
Could he not get Hilda out of his bones? Did she sleep in his bones
like a malady that awakes whenever it is disrespectfully treated?

He grew melancholy. Accustomed to savour the sadness of existence, he
soon accepted the new mood without resentment.

He resigned himself to the destruction of his dream. He was like a
captive whose cell has been opened in mistake, and who is too gentle to
rave when he sees it shut again. Only in secret he poured an
indifferent, careless scorn upon Auntie Hamps.

They played a whole interminable set, and then Edwin went home, possibly
marvelling at the variety of experience that a single hour may contain.

VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER TWELVE.

REVENGE.

Edwin re-entered his home with a feeling of dismayed resignation. There
was then no escape, and never could be any escape, from the existence to
which he was accustomed; even after his father's death, his existence
would still be essentially the same--incomplete and sterile. He
accepted the destiny, but he was daunted by it.

He quietly shut the front door, which had been ajar, and as he did so he
heard voices in the drawing-room.

"I tell ye I'm going to grow mushrooms," Darius was saying. "Can't I
grow mushrooms in my own cellar?" Then a snort.

"I don't think it'll be a good thing," was Maggie's calm reply.

"Ye've said that afore. Why won't it be a good thing? And what's it
got to do with you?" The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid,
was rising and becoming strong.

"Well, you'd be falling up and down the cellar steps. You know how dark
they are. Supposing you hurt yourself?"

"Ye'd only be too glad if I killed mysen!" said Darius, with a touch of
his ancient grimness.

There was a pause.

"And it seems they want a lot of attention, mushrooms do," Maggie went
on with unperturbed placidity. "You'd never be able to do it."

"Jane could help me," said Darius, in the tone of one who is rather
pleased with an ingenious suggestion.

"Oh no, she couldn't!" Maggie exclaimed, with a peculiar humorous
dryness which she employed only on the rarest occasions. Jane was the
desired Bathsheba.

"And I say she could!" the old man shouted with surprising vigour. "Her
does nothing! What does Mrs Nixon do? What do you do? Three great
strapping women in the house and doing nought! I say she shall!" The
voic