with her utterly and feeling that he must allow no natural instinct and rational argument to let him take advantage of her. And when he looked closer into this, a new difficulty arose, for how could he ever make Dinah understand this emotion, or set clearly before her comprehension what he himself as yet so dimly comprehended? Her grasp of the situation was clear and lucid. From the moment when she had said in the teashop, "D'you call that being married?" he guessed how she was going to feel, and how she would be prepared to act. Nor would the suggested confession to dead Enoch Withycombe have made any difference to Dinah, whatever view the old hunter might have held. Dinah's heart was single, and while now Maynard longed with a great longing to find his own heart seeing eye to eye with hers in every particular, he knew that it did not, and he could not be sure that it ever would. He regarded the situation as lying entirely between her and himself, and entertained no thought of any possibility that others might complicate it, either to retard, or determine the event. She had, indeed, told him of John Bamsey's threats, but to them he attached no importance. From within and not from without must the conclusion be reached. CHAPTER XXV JOHN AND JOE John Bamsey now threatened to run his head into folly. He was an intelligent man; but out of the ferment that had so long obscured his vision and upset his judgment, there had been developed a new thing, and a part of him that chance might have permitted to remain for ever dormant, inert and harmless, was now thrust uppermost. He developed a certain ferocity and a sullen and obstinate passion bred from sense of wrong, not only towards Dinah, but the unknown, who had supplanted him with her. For that he had been supplanted, despite her assurance to the contrary, John swore to himself. Thus, indeed, only could Dinah's defection be explained; and only so could he justify his purpose and determination to treat this interloper evilly and rob him, at any cost, of his triumph. He built up justification for himself, therefore, and assured himself that he was right, as a man of character, in taking revenge upon his unknown enemy. He convinced himself easily enough and only hesitated farther because his rival continued to be a shadow, to whom his sister alone was prepared to put a name. She resolutely swore that Maynard was the man, and she declared that her father had mentioned him and Dinah together, more than once, when rambling in his fever dreams. This brought John, from a general vague determination to stand between Dinah and any other man, to the necessity for definite deeds that should accomplish his purpose; and when he considered how to turn hate into action, he perceived the difficulty. But the folly and futility he declined to recognise, though his reason did not omit to force them upon him and declare that any violence would be vain.