was up-stairs and that
already the mistress and Ethel had begun to pack it; she was
submitting to destiny, but out of her soft blue eyes there shot a
glance now and then that made him quiver with pain.

He went out of the house the moment dinner was finished, and kept
moving about, now in the office, now in the yard, never still. Then,
when he was pottering round and round the office for the fiftieth time
in two hours, he heard a footstep, and Norah came--to whisper and
cling to him, to make him kiss her again; to penetrate him with her
ineffable sweetness; to plant the seeds of inextinguishable desire in
the last few cells and fibers of his brain that as yet she had not
reached.

"I don't ast you to stand in th' road when we drive away. I'd rather
not. Say good-by to me now, when there's nobody watchin'."

Then he had to take her in his arms once more; and they stood close to
the door, far from the window, pressed heart to heart, mute,
throbbing.

"I'm kissing you," she whispered presently, "but you're not kissing
me. Kiss me."

And he obeyed her.

"No," she whispered. "Different from that. Kiss me like you did
yesterday."

"Very well," he said hoarsely. "This is the good-by kiss. This is
good-by." And once again he felt the swift lambent ecstasy of a love
that he had never till now guessed at; a joy beyond words, beyond
dreams, beyond belief. "Now, you must go;" and he slowly released
himself, and held her at arm's length. "That was our good-by. Good-by,
my Norah--my darling--good-by." Then he went to the table in front of
the window, and sat down.

She came a little way from the door, and spoke to him before going out
and along the passage.

"I shan't mind now--however miserable I am--because I know it's all
right. An' I promise to be good, an' do all I'm told, an' always be
your own Norah."

Then she left him--the gray-haired respected Mr. Dale of Vine-Pits
Farm, sitting in his office window for all the world to see; looking
livid, shaky, old; and feeling like a Christian missionary in some
far-off heathen land, who, having preached to the gang of pirates into
whose hands he had fallen, lies now at the roadside with all his
inside torn away, and waits for birds with beaks or beasts with claws
to come and finish him.

Before the horse was put into the wagonette and the trunk brought
down-stairs, Dale had left the house and gone some distance along the
road in the direction of the Barradine Arms. Eve