He nodded, making the parting a slight thing and not missing the ludicrous in his anxiety to spare her pain. He went down the valley, leaving her sitting alone. He assumed a jaunty air and did not look round, but hastened off to the stile. Never in his most light-hearted moments had he walked thus or struck right and left at the leaves and shrubs with such a clumsy affectation of nonchalance. Thus he played the fool until out of sight; then his head came down, and his feet dragged, and his walk and mien grew years older than his age. He stopped presently and stood still, staring upon the silence. Westering sunlight winnowed through the underwood, splashed into its sombre depths and brightened the sobriety of a grey carpet dotted with dead cones. Sweet scents floated downward upon the sad whisper that lives in every pine forest; then came suddenly a crisp rattle of little claws and a tiny barking, where two red squirrels made love, high aloft, amid the grey lichens and emerald haze of a great larch that gleamed like a green lamp through the night of the dark surrounding foliage. Martin Grimbal dropped his stick and flung down his body in the hushed and hidden dreamland of the wood. Now he knew that his hope had lied to him, that the judgment he prided himself upon, and which had prompted him to this great deed, was at fault. The more than common tact and delicacy of feeling he had sometimes suspected he possessed in rare, exalted moments, were now shown vain ideas born from his own conceit; and the event had proved him no more subtle, clever, or far-seeing than other men. Indeed, he rated himself as an abject blunderer and thought he saw how a great overwhelming fear, at the bottom of his worship of Chris, had been the only true note in all that past war of emotions. But he had refused to listen and pushed forward; and now he stood thus. Looking back in the light of his defeat, his previous temerity amazed him. His own ugliness, awkwardness, and general unfitness to be the husband of Chris were ideas now thrust upward in all honesty to the top of his mind. No mock modesty or simulated delicacy inspired them, for after defeat a man is frank with himself. Whatever he may have pretended before he puts his love to the test, however he may have blinded himself as to his real feelings and beliefs before he offers his heart, after the event has ended unfavourably his real soul stands naked before him and, according to his character, he decides whether himself or the girl is the fool. Grimbal criticised his own audacity with scanty compassion now; and the thought of the tears of Chris made him clench one hand and smash it hard again and again into the palm of the other. No passionate protest rose in his mind against the selfish silence of Clement Hicks; he only saw his own blindness and magnified it into an absolute offence against Chris. Presently, as the sunlight sank lower, and the straight