d that subtle atmosphere of
things-being-not-altogether-well that hangs over a stricken household.
The cows had been milked, but they stood huddled about in the yard,
waiting impatiently to be driven out afield, and the poultry kept up an
importunate querulous reminder of deferred feeding-time; the yard pump,
which usually made discordant music at frequent intervals during the
early morning, was to-day ominously silent. In the house itself there
was a coming and going of scuttering footsteps, a rushing and dying
away of hurried voices, and long, uneasy stillnesses. Crefton finished
his dressing and made his way to the head of a narrow staircase. He
could hear a dull, complaining voice, a voice into which an awed hush
had crept, and recognized the speaker as Mrs. Spurfield.

"He'll go away, for sure," the voice was saying; "there are those as
runs away from one as soon as real misfortune shows itself."

Crefton felt that he probably was one of "those," and that there were
moments when it was advisable to be true to type.

He crept back to his room, collected and packed his few belongings,
placed the money due for his lodgings on a table, and made his way out
by a back door into the yard. A mob of poultry surged expectantly
towards him; shaking off their interested attentions he hurried along
under cover of cowstall, piggery, and hayricks till he reached the lane
at the back of the farm. A few minutes' walk, which only the burden of
his portmanteaux restrained from developing into an undisguised run,
brought him to a main road, where the early carrier soon overtook him
and sped him onward to the neighbouring town. At a bend of the road he
caught a last glimpse of the farm; the old gabled roofs and thatched
barns, the straggling orchard, and the medlar tree, with its wooden
seat, stood out with an almost spectral clearness in the early morning
light, and over it all brooded that air of magic possession which
Crefton had once mistaken for peace.

The bustle and roar of Paddington Station smote on his ears with a
welcome protective greeting.

"Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry," said a
fellow-traveller; "give me the peace and quiet of the country."

Crefton mentally surrendered his share of the desired commodity. A
crowded, brilliantly over-lighted music-hall, where an exuberant
rendering of "1812" was being given by a strenuous orchestra, came
nearest to his ideal of a nerve sedative.

THE