ittle sorry that she should think herself
crossed by me.

A thin cloud veiled the moon, and the way under the beeches was
dark and indistinct. I was not so preoccupied with my love-affairs
as to neglect what I will confess was always my custom at night
across that wild and lonely park. I made myself a club by fastening
a big flint to one end of my twisted handkerchief and tying the
other about my wrist, and with this in my pocket, went on comforted.

And it chanced that as I emerged from the hollies by the corner
of the shrubbery I was startled to come unexpectedly upon a young
man in evening dress smoking a cigar.

I was walking on turf, so that the sound I made was slight. He
stood clear in the moonlight, his cigar glowed like a blood-red
star, and it did not occur to me at the time that I advanced towards
him almost invisibly in an impenetrable shadow.

"Hullo," he cried, with a sort of amiable challenge. "I'm here
first!"

I came out into the light. "Who cares if you are?" said I.

I had jumped at once to an interpretation of his words. I knew that
there was an intermittent dispute between the House people and the
villager public about the use of this track, and it is needless to
say where my sympathies fell in that dispute.

"Eh?" he cried in surprise.

"Thought I would run away, I suppose," said I, and came close up
to him.

All my enormous hatred of his class had flared up at the sight of
his costume, at the fancied challenge of his words. I knew him. He
was Edward Verrall, son of the man who owned not only this great
estate but more than half of Rawdon's pot-bank, and who had interests
and possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of
the Four Towns. He was a gallant youngster, people said, and very
clever. Young as he was there was talk of parliament for him; he had
been a great success at the university, and he was being sedulously
popularized among us. He took with a light confidence, as a matter
of course, advantages that I would have faced the rack to get, and
I firmly believed myself a better man than he. He was, as he stood
there, a concentrated figure of all that filled me with bitterness.
One day he had stopped in a motor outside our house, and I remember
the thrill of rage with which I had noted the dutiful admiration
in my mother's eyes as she peered through her blind at him. "That's
young Mr. Verrall," she said. "They say he's very clever."

"They would," I answered. "Damn