but ourselves; and he was a small man, I a strong, big
boy. I walked beside him for fifty paces, then fell behind, leaped
at his neck and hurled him over the cliff in an instant. One yell he
gave and dropped six hundred feet. Then I fled over meadows inland
and returned home after dark. Neither I nor anybody else was ever
associated with the affair, and the death of Job Trevose has always
been ascribed to misadventure--the easier to believe since he was
not a temperate man.

From this experience I won, not remorse, but manhood. I rejoiced in
what I had done. But I did not tell any living soul and only my wife
ever heard the truth. Time passed and I proceeded with my life in
normal fashion, learning myself and increasing my understanding of
human nature. I was never under any domination of passion, but
exercised great restraint and found that only by self-knowledge and
self-command comes power. I did not seek forbidden fruit, but did
not shun it. My life proceeded orderly; I chose the profession of
dentist, as being likely to introduce me to people of a more
interesting type than my father's acquaintance; and I kept an open
mind for myself, but a shut mind for others.

My chief joy at this season was represented by my occasional visits
to Italy with my mother. Already I felt that land to be my home and
hated Cornwall and its bleak inhabitants. Then, at the psychological
moment, a girl woke instincts until then dormant; I was faced with
rarest good fortune and discovered a kindred spirit of the opposite
sex. That any woman lived who could see with my eyes, or share my
contempt of the trammels set round life, I did not believe until I
met with Jenny Redmayne. Women had never interested me, save in the
case of my mother, and I had seen none other with her large heart,
tolerance, humour and indifference to convention.

Then a chance friend, the brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his
niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the
seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of
mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a
convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her
laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one
possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, though never
measured, when I perceived that Jenny recognized in me the
complement and precious addition unconsciously sought of her own
spirit.

That spirit she ha