s
lonely suffering! And nobody, if they knew, would care, or pity him one
jot!

Was there really, then, as the ancients thought, a Daemon that liked to
play with men, as men liked to stir an earwig and turn it over and put a
foot on it in the end?

He got up and made his way towards the railway-station. There was the
bench where she had been sitting when he came on her that very morning.
The stars in their courses had seemed to fight for them then; but
whether for joy he no longer knew. And there on the seat were still the
pepper berries she had crushed and strewn. He broke off another bunch
and bruised them. That scent was the ghost of sacred minutes when her
hand lay against his own. The stars in their courses--for joy or sorrow!

VII

There was no peace now for Colonel and Mrs. Ercott. They felt themselves
conspirators, and of conspiracy they had never had the habit. Yet how
could they openly deal with anxieties which had arisen solely from what
they had chanced secretly to see? What was not intended for one's eyes
and ears did not exist; no canon of conduct could be quite so sacred.
As well defend the opening of another person's letters as admit the
possibility of making use of adventitious knowledge. So far tradition,
and indeed character, made them feel at one, and conspire freely. But
they diverged on a deeper plane. Mrs. Ercott had SAID, indeed, that here
was something which could not be controlled; the Colonel had FELT it--a
very different thing! Less tolerant in theory, he was touched at
heart; Mrs. Ercott, in theory almost approving--she read that dangerous
authoress, George Eliot--at heart felt cold towards her husband's niece.
For these reasons they could not in fact conspire without, in the end,
saying suddenly: "Well, it's no good talking about it!" and almost at
once beginning to talk about it again.

In proposing to her that mule, the Colonel had not had time, or, rather,
not quite conviction enough as to his line of action, to explain so
immediately the new need for her to sit upon it. It was only when, to
his somewhat strange relief, she had refused the expedition, and
Olive had started without them, that he told her of the meeting in the
Gardens, of which he had been witness. She then said at once that if she
had known she would, of course, have put up with anything in order to
go; not because she approved of interfering, but because they must think
of Robert! And the Colonel had said: "D--