ctly well on ten shillings a week; and, having thirty-two
pounds saved up, she would be all right for a year, after which she
would be able to earn her living. The principle she purposed to keep
before her eyes was that of committing herself to nothing which would
seriously interfere with her work in life. Somehow, it was impossible to
look at this girl, with her glowing cheeks and her glowing eyes, and her
hair frizzy from ardor, and to distrust her utterances. Yes! She would
arrive, if not where she wanted, at all events somewhere; which, after
all, was the great thing. And in fact she did arrive the very next day
in the back room high up in the back street, and neither Tod's cottage
nor the house on the Spaniard's Road saw more than flying gleams of her,
thenceforth.

Another by-product, this, of that little starting episode, the notice
given to Tryst! Strange how in life one little incident, one little
piece of living stress, can attract and gather round it the feelings,
thoughts, actions of people whose lives run far and wide away therefrom.
But episodes are thus potent only when charged with a significance that
comes from the clash of the deepest instincts.

During the six weeks which had elapsed between his return home from
Joyfields and the assizes, Felix had much leisure to reflect that if
Lady Malloring had not caused Tryst to be warned that he could not marry
his deceased wife's sister and continue to stay on the estate--the lives
of Felix himself, his daughter, mother, brother, brother's wife, their
son and daughter, and in less degree of his other brothers, would have
been free of a preoccupation little short of ludicrous in proportion to
the face value of the cause. But he had leisure, too, to reflect that
in reality the issue involved in that tiny episode concerned human
existence to its depths--for, what was it but the simple, all-important
question of human freedom? The simple, all-important issue of how far
men and women should try to rule the lives of others instead of trying
only to rule their own, and how far those others should allow their
lives to be so ruled? This it was which gave that episode its power
of attracting and affecting the thoughts, feelings, actions of so many
people otherwise remote. And though Felix was paternal enough to say to
himself nearly all the time, 'I can't let Nedda get further into this
mess!' he was philosopher enough to tell himself, in the unfatherly
balance of his