Her hands went to his shoulders and he kissed her, holding her very close to him so that he felt the deep inrush of her breath. She lay in his arms a moment, looking in his face like one to whom death might seem sweet. “Forgive me all this,” he said. “Gabriel, what should I forgive?” “My folly and my many weaknesses.” “You are strong now; let me go; I cannot bear it further.” She freed herself gently and stood aside from him, looking like a saint who had suffered and yet triumphed. When he had gone from her she sat down under the yews with the sunlight playing on her hair and her face white as ivory under the boughs. She remained motionless as some fair poem wrought in stone; only her eyes were alive with an infinite anguish that seemed to challenge heaven. It was Gabriel, the man, not Joan Gildersedge, who wept that day as he went stumbling through the woods towards his home. Was this, then, the fate of his idealism, the rough breaking of a woman’s heart? XXVIII OPHELIA STRONG had abandoned St. Aylmers and descended unannounced upon Saltire with bag and baggage. The irrepressible Miss Saker accompanied her. Manifold confidences had of late passed between the two, confidences of a most intimate and interesting nature. Miss Saker, at her “dear friend’s” earnest desire, had accompanied her to Saltire to support her in the somewhat delicate dramaticisms that threatened the domestic peace. Time, that green-eyed quipster, had set so cunningly the dial of circumstance that Ophelia’s return fell upon the day when Gabriel and Joan took leave of each other under the yews in Burnt House garden. It was late in the afternoon when Gabriel, parched and miserable, came up the road from Steelcross Bridge across the Mallan and saw a carriage swing into The Friary gate with a swirl of dust from the white highway. Two parasols, red and blue, flashed in the victoria, hiding the occupants as the carriage rounded the curve of the stone wall. The man’s conjectures, rife on the instant, suggested Judith and the Saltire equipage. As for his wife, her last letter had prophesied her advent as fixed for the second week in June. Tired and miserable as he was, he was in no mood for a social ordeal. At the lodge gate his gardener’s wife informed him with a courtesy that the young mistress had just driven up from the station.