able. This idea pleased him very well; it
satisfied his notions of integrity and fair dealing and also his
thrifty soul, which found trying the otherwise unavoidable duty of
paying a long price for what had been freely given. From this Joost
could not move him, so there was nothing for him to do but write
distressfully to Julia and explain and apologise.

CHAPTER XXII

THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Julia was at work in the kitchen; it was ten o'clock on a November
morning and she was busy; Captain Polkington had had breakfast
up-stairs, he often did now, and it delayed the morning's work. Mr.
Gillat brought in two letters which the postman had left; both were
for Julia, but she had not time to read them now, so she put them down
on the table; they would keep; she did not feel greatly interested to
know what was inside them. Things did not interest her as they used;
in some imperceptible way she had aged; some of the elasticity and
youth was gone, perhaps because hope was gone. It had been dying all
the summer, ever since the day when she crouched behind the
chopping-block; but gently and gradually, as the year dies, with some
beauties unknown in early days and little recurrent spurts of hope and
youth, like the flowers that bloom into winter's lap. But it was dead
now; there had come to her, as it were, a sudden frost, and, as
befalls in the years, too, the late blooming flowers, the coloured
leaves, the last beautiful clinging remnants of life withered all at
once and fell away. It was unreasonable, perhaps, that the Captain's
theft of the daffodil and what arose from it should have had this
result; but then it was possibly unreasonable that hope and youth
should have had any autumn at all and not died right off when she said
"No" and meant it that afternoon in the early summer. But then the
mind of man--and woman--is unreasonable.

It was nearly half-an-hour later when Julia picked up the letters;
both were from Holland; one, she fancied, was from Mijnheer, one from
his son. She opened the latter first; she rather wondered what Joost
could have to write about; he had acknowledged the receipt of the
daffodil bulb long ago. The matter was soon explained; the letter was
as formal and precise as ever, but the emotion that dictated it, the
distress and regret, was quite clear to Julia in spite of the primness
of expression. Clear, too, to her were the conflicting feelings that
lay behind the lover's contrition