But if Anne Purcell burned with a fever upon her bed, whimpering and calling continually on Mrs. Jael, who had taken a heavy bribe to bide beside her lady, my Lord Gore was in an equal fever of mind, the fever of a man who has many things to dread. He knew enough of the human heart to remember that the cords of silence char and slacken when Death holds the torch to the secrets of the past. A panic of penitence, the betrayal of others in the mad impulse to make amends, the emotions thirsting for the comfort of the confessional dew. And Stephen Gore was wise as to the gravity of a betrayal, for the man Grylls had ridden into Sussex, and Anne Purcell knew it, and the sealed order that he carried. Moreover, this blood-debt was not the only stain that darkened my lord’s consciousness. He was sunk to the chin in other and wider waters, where the breath from a hired creature’s lips might stir such a storm as should smother death into the mouths of many. He stood before the fire, staring into it, and turning the rings upon his fingers. For the moment it was all self with him: self, savage, querulous, impatient, driven to that height of fanaticism whence the sorrows and hopes of a man’s fellows seem infinitely small and insignificant. It was the mad, angry self that beats down and tramples on the life instincts of others, crying a savage sacrifice to the Moloch of the ego. And yet this man in the satin coat, so bland, so debonair, so generous on the surface, heard the low clamor of that underworld that every man carries in the deeps of consciousness. He suffered, yet would not countenance his suffering, hardening himself to escape from it with fierce strength and subtlety and anger. XXXIII If Winnie Jennifer was not in love with John Gore, she was in love with the love in him, for no man could sit and stare so at the fire, and look so quietly grim over such a matter, without winning over a woman’s heart. There was a romance here, and your true woman, be she drudge or madam, has that trick of the fancy that lifts life out of its sordid round and makes her a queen of the fairies, though there be gray in her hair. And when he looked at Winnie with those deepset eyes of his she knew that he was looking beyond her toward his love, and that the heart in him said: “I must go to her, for she has suffered.” Therefore, when John Gore rose up from the ingle-nook about three in the afternoon, and asked her whether Mr. Jennifer could lend him several fathoms of good rope, Mrs. Winnie regarded him with a curious glint of the eyes, and felt a delight in meddling in such a matter. “To be sure, sir, there is a good round of rope hanging on a harness-peg in the stable. Come you—we will see.” She went out with him, swinging her brown arms and holding her head high, as though proud in her woman’s way of sharing in the adventure, and, opening the stable door, showed him a hank of brown rope hanging from the wood.