that she
had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a
successful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer" as
his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold
hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to
women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and
adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory to
its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its
group of satellite watering-places and "settling him down," in the
vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was
his country house.

"You will never get Mortimer to go," his mother had said carpingly,
"but if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell
over him as Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but
Yessney--" and the dowager had shrugged her shoulders.

There was a sombre almost savage wildness about Yessney that was
certainly not likely to appeal to town-bred tastes, and Sylvia,
notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more sylvan
than "leafy Kensington." She looked on the country as something
excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome
if you encouraged it overmuch. Distrust of town-life had been a new
thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she had watched
with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she called "the
Jermyn-street-look" in his eyes as the woods and heather of Yessney had
closed in on them yesternight. Her will-power and strategy had
prevailed; Mortimer would stay.

Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf, which
the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected
fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into
cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery
there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of
unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a
School-of-Art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she
almost shuddered.

"It is very wild," she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; "one could
almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite
died out."

"The worship of Pan never has died out," said Mortimer. "Other newer
gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the
Nature-God to whom all must co