least the satisfaction of making things clear.

"You only cared for me as a martyr," she ended.

"I didn't, you know I didn't," he protested on the spur of the moment.

But both knew that it was more than half the truth.

Their letters of renunciation crossed.

Chance and John Berrisford had been powerful allies.

X

On a still October afternoon Martin lay where the first slopes of Grey
Knotts go sweeping up to the great mountain mass of The Gables and the
Scawfells. He looked down upon Seatoller, diminutive below him, and on
the curving beauty of Borrowdale, burnished with late bracken, aflame
with autumnal trees. Behind him he knew, he felt, were the mountains
that he loved, stretching crag upon crag to the desolate screes of Wast
Water and the glimpse of the shimmering sea. Borrowdale ... there
flashed suddenly upon his mind the verse of the Elfreyan poet and he
quoted it now to the winds and rocks and a curious stone-finch:

"'The flaming bracken fires the breast
Of bosky Borrowdale,
Down swoops the sun in a riot of red
Behind Scawfell to a watery bed,
And the moon hath clomb o'er Skiddaw's head,
So perfect and so pale."

With that pathetic verse came other memories, flowing torrentially
through the opened flood-gates of his mind. For five years he had
forgotten Elfrey and Berney's and all his schoolday toils and triumphs.
Only one week-end had he spent there and that in his 'fresher' year.
He had forgotten because Oxford had been so generous and had given him
so much to think and feel and say. But now his recollections seemed
strangely vivid despite their long storage in the lumber-room of his
mind. Foskett had made another step on the pathway of prosperity, but
Berney was still at work: Vickers had moved to higher things, but Barmy
Walters lingered on, for he had reached the dotage in which years add
nothing to decay. The same old jokes would be played, the crashing of
the instrument-boxes, the passing of fruit-bags and biscuit tins, and
the pollution of his water with ink. And somehow, against the
promptings of conscience, Martin felt that it was right for these
things to go on. Poor Barmy! But with his uncle he believed in
Institutions.

Then the amazing disappearance of people broke in upon his mind.
Spots, for instance. His career had flickered out at Cambridge, where
they had despised his athletics. Drink, perhaps. Cullen and Neave,
surely they must