't know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step,
heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.

"One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me
that 'women were funny.' I had heard already of domestic differences.
People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what
sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent,
unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day
as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing
to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some
harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the
evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him
by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child--in
his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so
that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our
ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife
should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that would pass, he said.
And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate
that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion,
charitable to the poor!

"I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his
strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
had begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered...."

The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of
the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the
hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.

"Physiologically, now," he said, turning away abruptly, "it was
possible. It was possible."

He remained silent. Then went on--"At all events, the next time I saw
him he was ill--lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not
acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of
course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state
of depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a
couch downstairs.

"A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the
little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting
steam on the hob, and some child's linen lay drying on the fender. The
room was warm, but the door opens righ