Two years ago he had been just two years behind his plans. His savings were not yet quite full-grown, his wife was still to secure. Not but what things were more or less fixed between Agnes and himself, and had been, indeed, for long. It had been a kindly courting, too, with never a quarrel of any sort to break its charm, and scarcely a casual look or impatient word. Most certainly it had not resembled in any degree the cat-and-mouse exhibition presented by Marget and Bob. He had never imagined that they might slip apart until the thing was on the point of coming about, still less ever dreamed that they might do so with the end of the road actually in sight. Nevertheless, when the changes had begun with a rush, the first of them had announced itself just here. Suddenly she had turned from him, half hesitating, it was true, but turning away from him, all the same. She was not certain, she said, that she could marry him, after all, and it was better to think now than on the other side of the ring. She had no reason to give except that she wasn’t sure, and all his wrath and persuasion could not change her mind. He was free to leave her, she told him, if he thought it best, or welcome to wait for the puzzle to come right. He had chosen to wait, if the impossibility of doing anything else might be dignified by the name of choice. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had already waited too long, but he was unable to tear himself from his settled course. Months of bewildered argument and rage brought him no nearer the solution of the point. Perhaps, after all, they had not been suited, in spite of the pleasant years. Perhaps it was just that the sight of the end, which sent him pressing on, had startled her to a halt and a springing aside. Thomas, for whom nothing had ever gone amiss, found it hard to believe that fate was really playing him false. His disgust, when the truth was finally forced upon him, was that of a man seeing for the first time the other side of the shield. The trouble and dread of his threatened loss had all the freshness of first pain and dread. It seemed to him that, if he lost Agnes, everything else in his scheme of life might possibly go as well; and while he was passing through this uncertain time, trying hard to regain his old security of belief, the trouble at home threatened afresh the ground beneath his feet. He had been fond of his mother, and was shaken by her loss, and he was hit, as well, by his brother’s accident and death, yet neither calamity seemed for the moment to threaten either his future or his present way of life. Yet he must have known what would happen if his thoughts had not been entirely fixed elsewhere. Kit had muddled along for a while with the help of a hired man, and then one night he sent for his two remaining sons.