Their fly was waiting at the door, and in less than a minute they were rolling quickly down the avenue. Adrian, stooping to tuck a rug about his wife's feet, only raised himself in time to catch a last glimpse of the white house front, and to cry, "Good-bye, Mitchelhurst!" Barbara echoed his good-bye. Mitchelhurst was only an episode in her life; she cared for the place, yet she was not sorry to escape from its shadows of loves and hates, too deep and dark for her, and its unconquerable melancholy. She left it, but a touch of its sadness would cling to her in after years, giving her the tenderness which comes from a sense--dim, perhaps, but all-pervading--of the underlying suffering of the world. She looked back and saw her happiness tossed lightly and miraculously from crest to crest of the black waves which might have engulfed it in a moment; and even as she leaned in the warm shelter of Adrian's arm, she was sorry for the lives that were wrecked, and broken, and forgotten. "Look!" he said quickly, as the road wound along the hill-side, and a steep bank, crowned with leafless thorns and brown stunted oaks, rose on the right, "this is where I said good-bye to you, Barbara, and you never knew it!" "Never!" she cried. "No, I thought you had gone away, and hadn't cared to say good-bye." "Well, you were kinder to me than you knew. You left me a bunch of red berries lying in the road." "Ah, but if I had known you were there!" "Why," said Adrian, "you wouldn't have left me anything at all. You would have died first! You know you would! It was better as it was." "Perhaps," she allowed. "Anyhow, it is best as it is," said he conclusively, and to that she agreed; but her smile was followed by a quick little sigh. "What does that mean?" he demanded, tenderly. "Nothing," she said, "nothing, _really_." It was nothing. Only, absorbed in picturing Adrian's mute farewell, she had passed the place where she first saw Reynold Harding, and had not spared him one thought as she went by. And she was never coming to Mitchelhurst again. THE END. _Clay and Taylor, Printers, Bungay, Suffolk._ * * * * * Transcriber's Notes Spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been standardised. Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics). End of Project Gutenberg's Mitchelhurst Place, Vol. II, by Margaret Veley