said the lady who was interviewing Mrs.
Warrender. There was a little group of the younger ladies round Chatty,
talking about the parish and the current amusements, and hoping that she
would join the archery club, and that she loved croquet. The conversation
was very animated on that side, one voice echoing another, although the
replies of Chatty were mild. Geoff had all the centre of the room to
himself, and stood there as on a stage, putting the reel of red silk
into the square which was intended for the blue, and arranging the
colours in squares and parallels. He was much absorbed in it, and yet
he did not know what he was doing. His little bosom swelled high with
thought, his heart was wrung with the poignancy of love rejected--of
loss and change. It was not that he was jealous; the sensations which he
experienced had little bitterness or anger in them. Presently he turned
round and said, "I think I shall go home, Mrs. Warrender," with a
disagreeable consciousness that everybody paused and looked at him, when
his small voice broke the murmur of the feminine conversation. But what
did that matter to Geoff? He had much to occupy him, too much to leave
him free to think how people looked, or what they said.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Geoff's heart was full. He pondered all the way home, neglecting all
the blandishments of Black's conversation, who had visited a friend or
two in Highcombe, and was full of cheerfulness and very loquacious.
Geoff let him talk, but paid no attention. He himself had gone to Mrs.
Warrender, whom he liked, with the hope of disburdening from his little
bosom some of the perilous stuff which weighed upon his soul. He had
wanted to _sfogarsi_, as the Italians say, to relieve a heart too full
to go on any longer: but Geoff found, as so many others have found
before him, that the relief thus obtained but made continued silence
more intolerable. He could not shut up the doors again which had thus
been forced open. The sensation which overwhelmed him was one which most
people at one time or another have felt,--that the circumstances amid
which he was placed had become insupportable, that life could no longer
go on, under such conditions,--a situation terrible to the maturest man
or woman, but what word can describe it in the heart of a child? In his
mother was summed up all love and reliance, all faith and admiration for
Geoff. She had been as the sun to him. She had been as God, the only
known and v