holm remembered the wide-eyed way in which Steel had looked at his
wife before replying, and the man's embarrassment grew automatically in
his mind. His lips had indeed shut very tight, but unconscious
exaggeration made them tremble first.

And then the fellow's manner to himself, his defiant taunts, his final
challenge! Langholm was not sorry to remember the last; it relieved him
from the moral incubus of the clandestine and the underhand; it bid him
go on and do his worst; it set his eyes upon the issue as between
himself and Steel, and it shut them to the final possibilities as
touching the woman in the case.

So Langholm came back from sultry London to a world of smoke and rain,
with furnaces flaring through the blurred windows, and the soot laid
with the dust in one of the grimiest towns in the island; but he soon
shook both from his feet, and doubled back upon the local line to a
rural station within a mile and a half of his cottage. This distance he
walked by muddy ways, through the peculiarly humid atmosphere created by
a sky that has rained itself out and an earth that can hold no more,
and came finally to his dripping garden by the wicket at the back of the
cottage. There he stood to inhale the fine earthy fragrance which atoned
somewhat for a rather desolate scene. The roses were all washed away.
William Allen Richardson clung here and there, in the shelter of the
southern eaves, but he was far past his prime, and had better have
perished with the exposed beauties on the tiny trees. The soaking
foliage had a bluish tinge; the glimpse of wooded upland, across the
valley through the gap in the hedge of Penzance briers, lay colorless
and indistinct as a faded print from an imperfect negative. A footstep
crunched the wet gravel at Langholm's back.

"Thank God you've got back, sir!" cried a Yorkshire voice in devout
accents; and Langholm, turning, met the troubled face and tired eyes of
the woman next door, who kept house for him while living in her own.

"My dear Mrs. Brunton," he exclaimed, "what on earth has happened? You
didn't expect me earlier, did you? I wired you my train first thing this
morning."

"Oh, no, it isn't that, sir. It's--it's the poor young gentleman--"

And her apron went to her eyes.

"What young gentleman, Mrs. Brunton?"

"Him 'at you saw i' London an' sent all this way for change of air! He
wasn't fit to travel half the distance. I've been nursing of him all
night and all day too.