without speaking, and he was trembling.

"Wasn't there anything?" he whispered. "Is it here too? Can't you keep
it away?"

Lily said nothing. She opened the inn door. Maurice stepped into the
passage, heavily, almost like a drunken man. And this was the first
night of their honeymoon.

The incident of the moor threw Maurice back into the old misery from
which he had emerged for a brief moment, and, indeed, plunged him into
an abyss of despair such as he had never known before. For now he had
sincerely hoped for salvation, and his hope had been frustrated. He had
clung to a belief that Lily's love, Lily's companionship might avail to
rescue him from the phantom, or the reality, that was destroying his
power, shattering his manhood. The belief was dashed from him, and he
sank deeper in the sea of terror. They stayed on for a while in this
Sleepy Hollow, but Maurice no longer felt its peace. Remote as it was,
cloistered in the rolling moors, the cry of the child penetrated to it,
making it the very centre, the very core of all things hideous and
terrible. Even the silence of the village, its aloofness from the world,
became hateful to Maurice. For they seemed to emphasise and to
concentrate the voice that pierced more keenly in silence, that sounded
more horrible in solitude.

"I cannot stay here," he said to Lily. "Let us go back. I will take up
my work again. I will try to throw myself into it as I did when I was a
student. I shut out the living cry then, I will shut out the dead cry
now. For you--you cannot help me."

He looked at her while he spoke almost contemptuously, almost as one
looks at some woman whose courage or whose faith one has tried and found
wanting.

"You cannot help me," he repeated.

Secretly he felt a cruel desire to sting Lily into passion, to rouse her
to some demonstration of anger against his cowardice in thus taunting
her love and devotion. But she said nothing, only looked at him with
eyes that had become strangely steadfast, and full of the quiet light of
a great calm and patience.

"D'you say nothing?" he said.

"If you wish to go, Maurice, let us go."

He had got up and was standing by the low window that looked across the
moor.

"Don't you see," he said, "that I am going mad in this place? And you do
nothing. Why did I ever think that you could help me?"

"Try to think so still."

She, too, got up, followed him to the window and put her two hands on
his shoulders.

"Perh