ree.

A few shillings remained in his pocket. They would have paid his fare
towards Wiltshire, a good county; but what should he do there? Who
would employ him? Today the journey did not seem worth while. "Tomorrow,
perhaps," he thought, and determined to spend the money on pleasure of
another kind. Two-pence went for a ride on an electric tram. From the
top he saw the sun descend--a disc with a dark red edge. The same sun
was descending over Salisbury intolerably bright. Out of the golden haze
the spire would be piercing, like a purple needle; then mists arose from
the Avon and the other streams. Lamps flickered, but in the outer purity
the villages were already slumbering. Salisbury is only a Gothic upstart
beside these. For generations they have come down to her to buy or to
worship, and have found in her the reasonable crisis of their lives;
but generations before she was built they were clinging to the soil, and
renewing it with sheep and dogs and men, who found the crisis of their
lives upon Stonehenge. The blood of these men ran in Stephen; the vigour
they had won for him was as yet untarnished; out on those downs they had
united with rough women to make the thing he spoke of as "himself"; the
last of them has rescued a woman of a different kind from streets and
houses such as these. As the sun descended he got off the tram with a
smile of expectation. A public-house lay opposite, and a boy in a dirty
uniform was already lighting its enormous lamp. His lips parted, and he
went in.

Two hours later, when Rickie and Herbert were going the rounds, a brick
came crashing at the study window. Herbert peered into the garden, and a
hooligan slipped by him into the house, wrecked the hall, lurched up the
stairs, fell against the banisters, balanced for a moment on his spine,
and slid over. Herbert called for the police. Rickie, who was upon the
landing, caught the man by the knees and saved his life.

"What is it?" cried Agnes, emerging.

"It's Stephen come back," was the answer. "Hullo, Stephen!"

XXXI

Hither had Rickie moved in ten days--from disgust to penitence, from
penitence to longing from a life of horror to a new life, in which he
still surprised himself by unexpected words. Hullo, Stephen! For the son
of his mother had come back, to forgive him, as she would have done, to
live with him, as she had planned.

"He's drunk this time," said Agnes wearily. She too had altered: the
scandal was ageing her,