ction of its effects so little of a given quality went
so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a
difference.

"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives such
depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They've
been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful."

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house,
hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of
commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large
nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in
its special sense--the sense of having been for centuries a deep, dim
reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid
order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into
the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the
green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence
sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion,
and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when,
waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and
stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after
luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of
late that he preferred to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and,
in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven
to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning's
work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined
it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been
there in his engineering days. Then he had often looked fagged to the
verge of illness, but the native demon of "worry" had never branded his
brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her--the introduction, and
a synopsis of the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession
of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done
with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible
element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then?
But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire,