Produced by Charles Franks, Carel Miske and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team REST HARROW A COMEDY OF RESOLUTION By Maurice Hewlett “Rest Harrow grows in any soil.... The seeds may be sown as soon as ripe in warm, sheltered spots out of doors.... It is a British plant.” --WEATHERS With Illustrations By Frank Craig THI KANNICTHI CONTENTS BOOK I OF THE NATURE OF A PROLOGUE, DEALING WITH A BRUISED PHILOSOPHER IN RETIREMENT BOOK II SANCHIA AT WANLESS HALL BOOK III INTERLUDE OF THE RECLUSE PHILOSOPHER BOOK IV SANCHIA IN LONDON BOOK V OF THE NATURE OF AN EPILOGUE, DEALING WITH DESPOINA ILLUSTRATIONS (not available in this edition) Wrote deliberately to each of her sisters The hum of cities, and buzz of dinner tables . . sound in his ears not at all. The housekeeper! This--person! He had eloquence, he thought, as he watched her, he had won. But he was anxious. She was such a deep one. Ploughman in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure on the sky-line. “Well, Sanchia,” he said, “here I am.” The great music went sobbing and chiding through her frame, like wounded nightingales. Senhouse came back to her bedside and put a little flower into her hand [Illustration: Wrote deliberately to each of her sisters.] BOOK I -- OF THE NATURE OF A PROLOGUE, DEALING WITH A BRUISED PHILOSOPHER IN RETIREMENT I An observant traveller, homing to England by the Ostend-Dover packet in the April of some five years ago, relished the vagaries of a curious couple who arrived by a later train, and proved to be both of his acquaintance. He had happened to be early abroad, and saw them come on. They were a lady of some personal attraction, comfortably furred, who, descending from a first-class carriage, was met by a man from a third-class, bare-headed, free in the neck, loosely clad in grey flannel trousers which flapped about his thin legs in the sea-breeze, a white sweater with a rolling collar, and a pair of sandals upon brown and sinewy feet uncovered by socks: these two. The man's garniture was extraordinary, but himself no less so. He had a lean and deeply bronzed face, hatchet-shaped like a Hindoo's. You looked instinctively for rings in his ears. His moustache was black and sinuous, outlining his mouth rather than hiding it. His hair, densely black, was longish and perfectly straight. His eyes were far-sighted and unblinking; he smiled always, but furtively, as if the world at large amused him, but must never know it. He seemed to observe everything, except the fact that everybody observed himself.