. They never change. I turn to them
naturally. But they overrate humanity."

"Our interests are so different. Yet both belong to the fresh air and
the wild places remote from towns. My book is nearly finished. I shall
publish it in a year's time, or even less."

"Have you come back to stop?"

"Yes, for good and all now."

"You have found no wife in your wanderings?"

"No, John. I shall never marry. That was a dark spot in my life, as it
was in yours. We both broke our shins over that."

"I broke nothing--but another man's bones."

He was silent for a moment, then proceeded abruptly on this theme.

"The old feeling is pretty well dead though. I look on and watch the man
ruining himself; I see his wife getting hard-faced and thin, and I
wonder what magic was in her, and am quite content. I wouldn't kick him
a yard quicker to the devil if I could. I watch him drift there."

"Don't talk like that, dear old chap. You're not the man you pretend to
be, and pretend to think yourself. Don't sour your nature so. Let the
past lie and go into the world and end this lonely existence."

"Why don't you?"

"The circumstances are different. I am not a man for a wife. You are, if
ever there was one."

"I had him within a hair's-breadth once," resumed the other
inconsequently. "Blanchard, I mean. There 's a secret against him. You
didn't know that, but there is. Some black devilry for all I can tell.
But I missed it. Perhaps if I knew it would quicken up my spirit and
remind me of all the brute made me endure."

"Yet you say the old feeling is dead!"

"So it is--starved. Hicks knew. He broke his neck an hour too soon. It
was like a dream of a magnificent banquet I had some time ago. I woke
with my mouth watering, just as the food was uncovered, and I felt so
damned savage at being done out of the grub that I got up and went
down-stairs and had half a pint of champagne and half a cold roast
partridge! I watch Blanchard go down the hill--that's all. If this
knowledge had come to me when I was boiling, I should have used it to
his utmost harm, of course. Now I sometimes doubt, even if I could hang
the man, whether I should take the trouble to do it."

"Get away from him and all thought of him."

"I do. He never crosses my mind unless he crosses my eyes. I ride past
Newtake occasionally, and see him sweating and slaving and fighting the
Moor. Then I laugh, as you laugh at a child building sand castles
against an oncoming t