Janet went to bed early. She had suddenly found that she could sleep, and her appetite for sleep became abnormal. She woke each morning greedily counting the hours till night. In the old careless days she had never set such store on sleep, because it had meant merely strengthening and resting and refreshing; now it meant what was more to her than anything else in life--forgetting. Nigel could not sleep. In his heart the lights were not yet all put out. There were flashes of terror and sparks of desire, and dull flares of conjecture. He had sometimes hesitated whether he should tell Janey his secret, but had drawn back on each occasion, urged partly by the thought of adding to her burden, but principally by a feeling of shame. His wonderful dream, which had sustained him so triumphantly during six months of work and sacrifice, had now shrivelled into a poor little secret, such as school-girls nurture--a love which must always be hidden and silent and unconsummated. His brain ached with regrets and revisualisations, quaked with apprehension and the knowledge of his own utter helplessness in the face of circumstances. The thought of Lowe's perfidy to Janet would rouse in him a sweat of rage from his poor attempts at sleep. Janey stood to Nigel for all that was noble, meek and understanding, and that she should be treated heartlessly and lightly by a scoundrel not worthy to black her boots, was a thought that drove him nearly rabid with hate. What was he to do to save Tony from this swine? He knew perfectly well how she would look upon him if she heard his story. He remembered the hard, stiff little figure in the garden of Shovelstrode--"You won my friendship under false pretences." What would she say to the cad who had won by false pretences not only her friendship but her body, her heart and her soul? Yet he could never tell her the truth. He would not betray Janet even to this girl he loved, and a vague accusation could easily be denied by Lowe, and was not likely to be believed by Tony. Often he envied Len--lost in cool sleep, free from responsibilities and problems, eased for ever from the soul-chafing burdens of hate and love. It was the beginning of July. Sunshine baked on the fields, and drank the green out of the grass, so that the fields were brown, with splashes of yellow where the buttercups still grew. In the hedges the wild elder-rose sent out its sickening sweetness, while from the ditches came the even more cloying fragrance of the meadowsweet. The haze of a great heat veiled the distance from Nigel, as he tramped over the parched grass into Kent. He saw the roofs of Scarlets and Redpale shimmering in the valley of the hammer ponds, but beyond them was a fiery, thundering dusk, which swallowed up the hills of Cowden in the east.