given him, examined the
nib, dipped it very slowly in the ink, and wrote with sudden swiftness.

"Allow me to remind you that you made no objection at the time to the
manner of our encounter and my choice of weapons, by means of which
publicity was avoided. The risk was equal. You now, at the last moment,
propose that I should run it a second time, and in a manner to cause
instant scandal. I must decline to do so, or to reopen the subject,
which had received my careful consideration before I decided upon it. I
have burned your letter, and desire you will burn mine."

"Poor devil!" said Lord Newhaven, putting the letter, not in the
post-box at his elbow, but in his pocket.

"Loftus and I did him an ill turn when we pulled him out of the water."

* * * * *

The letter took its own time, for it had to avoid possible pitfalls. It
shunned the company of the other Westhope letters, it avoided the
village post-office, but after a day's delay it was launched, and lay
among a hundred others in a station pillar-box. And then it hurried,
hurried as fast as express train could take it, till it reached its
London address, and went softly up-stairs, and laid itself, with a few
others, on Hugh's breakfast-table.

For many weeks since his visit at Wilderleigh Hugh had been like a man
in a boat without oars, drifting slowly, imperceptibly on the placid
current of a mighty river, who far away hears the fall of Niagara
droning like a bumblebee in a lily cup.

Long ago, in the summer, he had recognized the sound, had realized the
steep agony towards which the current was bearing him, and had struggled
horribly, impotently, against the inevitable. But of late, though the
sound was ever in his ears, welling up out of the blue distance, he had
given up the useless struggle, and lay still in the sunshine watching
the summer woods slide past and the clouds sail away, always away and
away, to the birthplace of the river, to that little fluttering pulse in
the heart of the hills which a woman's hand might cover, the infant
pulse of the great river to be.

Hugh's thoughts went back, like the clouds, towards that tiny spring of
passion in his own life. He felt that he could have forgiven it--and
himself--if he had been swept into the vortex of a headlong mountain
torrent leaping down its own wild water-way, carrying all before it.
Other men he had seen who had been wrested off their feet, swept out of
their