th you
no remedy is possible for generous mistakes. The world isn't quite so
badly made as all that. There is a remedy for every mistake except--a
few physical ones, which we euphuistically describe as visitations of
God.--Steady, steady there--wait a bit.--And I--I tell you I can't sit
down under this unhappiness of yours and just put up with it. Don't
think me a meddling fool, please. Something's got to be done. I know I
probably appear to you the last person in the world to be of use. And
yet I'm not sure about that. I have time--too much of it--and I'm not
quite an ass. And you--you must know, I think, there's nothing in
heaven or earth I would not do for you that I could----"

The miller hauled his slow-moving team aside, with beery-thick
objurgations and apologies. The groom swung himself up at the back of
the carriage again. The impatient horses, getting their heads, swung
away down Sandyfield Street--scattering a litter of merry, little,
black pigs and remonstrant fowls to right and left--past modest village
shop, and yellow-washed tavern, and red, lichen-stained cottage,
beneath the row of tall Lombardy poplars that raised their brown-gray
spires to the blue-gray of the autumn sky. Richard's left hand held the
reins again.

"Half confidences are no good," he said. "So, as you've trusted me thus
far, Helen, don't you think you will trust somewhat further? Be
explicit. Tell me the rest?"

And hearing him, seeing him just then, Madame de Vallorbes' heart
melted within her, and, to her own prodigious surprise, she had much
ado not to weep.

CHAPTER IX

WHICH TOUCHES INCIDENTALLY ON MATTERS OF FINANCE

As Richard had predicted the fog reappeared towards sun sunset. At
first, as a frail mist, through which the landscape looked colourless
and blurred. Later it rose, growing in density, until all objects
beyond a radius of some twenty paces were engulfed in its nothingness
and lost. Later still--while Helen de Vallorbes paid her visit at
Newlands--it grew denser yet, heavy, torpid, close yet cold, penetrated
by earthy odours as the atmosphere of a vault, oppressive to the
senses, baffling to sight and hearing alike. From out it, half-leafless
branches, like gaunt arms in tattered draperies, seemed to claw and
beckon at the passing carriage and its occupants. The silver mountings
of the harness showed in points and splashes of hard, shining white as
against the shifting, universal dead-whiteness of it, w