and would not have a moment in the morning. And then he kissed my
mother and kissed me, and went away and left us both crying. There were
tears in his own eyes as he stepped out into the summer twilight, but
he turned to look back at us, and waved his hat and called out good-bye
with a firm voice.

A sullen blackness settled down upon me after Lancelot's departure. I
was minded to rise early in the morning to see him off by the coach, but
I was so tired with crying and complaining that when I fell asleep I
slept like a log, and did not wake until the morning sun was high and
the coach had been long gone. Well, it was all the better, I told myself
savagely. He had gone out of my life for good, and I should see no more
of him. I had lost in the same hour my love and my friend. I would make
up my mind to be lonely and pay no heed. As for the picture he gave me,
what good to me was the face of that fair girl? Lancelot's sister
Marjorie was a gentlewoman, born and bred, as my lost Lancelot was a
gentleman. What could she or he really have to do with the mercerman in
the dull little Sussex town? Marjorie had a beautiful face, if the
limner did not lie--and indeed he did not--and I could well believe that
as lovely a soul as Lancelot lauded shone through those candid eyes. But
again, what was it to me and my yardwand? So I hid the picture away in a
little sweet-scented cedar-wood box that I had, and resolved to forget
Lancelot and Lancelot's sister, and everything else in the world except
my blighted youth and my blighted hopes.

I reasoned as a boy reasons who thinks that the world has come to an end
for him after his first check, and who has no knowledge as yet of the
medicine of time. My mother had but a vexatious life of it with me, for
I was silent and melancholy; and though I never, indeed, offended her by
uncivil word or deed, yet the sight of my dreary visage must have been a
sore trial to her, and the glum despondency with which I accepted all
her efforts to cheer me from my humours must have wrung her heart.

Poor dear! She thought, I believe, that it was only grief for Lancelot
which touched me so; and once, after some days of my ill-temper, she
asked me if I would like to run up to London and see my friend. But I
shook my head. I had made up my mind to have done with everything; to
stay on there to the end, morosely resigned to my lot.

To make myself more sure in isolation I even took the letter which came
from