their departure and waving his big silk handkerchief. And they would set off on their homeward journey up the village street, along the road through the cut in the embankment, and along the road until it dissolved into the green track that led across the Downs. Still with her eyes upon the ground she walked rapidly, as though anxious to find herself once more safe within the shelter of Starvecrow. Calladine’s long legs easily kept pace with her; and she had the impression that, even were she to run, she could never escape from him. He strode beside her, talking of her father, talking of those minor things which, she had found, occupied so much of his attention, and always with the assumption that her interest equalled his own. Once or twice he wanted to leave the track and make their way home across country, but when he suggested this she always pretexed her anxiety to be once more ensconced in their own room. This invariably pleased him, and he acquiesced. She could not, no, she could not, stray across the Downs with him. She renounced the Downs. She could not share them with Calladine; not even with his mere physical presence could she share them. She cramped herself within the house and the little garden. The moment came when Calladine commented upon it. “Don’t you want to go for a walk, Clare?” She did not;--she clung to their meagre patch of cultivation. “You are grown quite stay-at-home,” he prodded, fondly. The great Downs,--that stealthy population out on the Downs. Waiting for her,--the call of nature, always, and now the call of humanity. Out there, she could respond, she could feel, she could learn. Once she had not wanted to learn. She had shirked knowledge. Now, she had acquired knowledge, and could bear a yet deeper learning. She was avid, indeed, for the deepest draught of knowledge. Those bare great Downs, they were not bare; they were peopled. She might learn the first lesson from their storm, and the ultimate lesson from their serenity. But it was not in Calladine’s company that she would learn it. Such lessons were learnt in the severest solitude, with the senses of the soul stripped to flagellation.