The fires in his heart seemed to die. He felt bruises where Len had struck him, but they galled him no longer; the half-forgotten peace and liberty of other days was beginning to drift like a shower into his breast. Why could he not live always in the woods, instead of among people whom he hurt and who hurt him, though he loved them and they loved him? There was no love in the woods--love had passed out of them in September, leaving them very quiet, very peaceful, in a great brown hush of sleep. Love was what hurt in life--love and brains; take away these and you take away suffering. Oh, if love and thought could go together out of his life as they had gone out of the woods--and leave him in a great brown hush of sleep. For nearly an hour he lay in the brake, hidden by golden tangles of bracken and stiff clumps of tansy. He had begun to drowse, and capture rags of happiness in dreams, when suddenly he heard a rustling in the bushes. Hang it all! He could not have peace, even in the woods. The rustling came nearer, and he heard the panting of a dog--with a mumbled oath he sat up in the fern. "Oh!..." Nigel's head and shoulders were not a reassuring sight to confront one suddenly on a lonely woodland walk, and though Tony did not scream her voice was full of alarm. At first Nigel did not recognise her, she stirred up in him merely impersonal feelings of annoyance, but the next moment he seemed to see her face in a glow of lamplight on East Grinstead platform. This was the lone girl-kid he had befriended--and thought no more of since then. "I beg your pardon," he said hastily, scrambling to his feet, "I'm afraid I startled you." "Oh, no"--she looked awkward and embarrassed. "You're Mr. Smith, aren't you?" Nigel stared at her in some bewilderment, then suddenly remembered another of the half-forgotten incidents of that night. "Yes--I'm Smith," he said slowly. "I--I hope you got home all right in the taxi." "Quite all right, thank you--and mother said I ought to be very grateful to you for taking such care of me." There was something about this school-girl, who evidently took him for a man of her own class and position, which filled him with an infinite pain--a pain that was half a wistful pleasure. She stood before him in the path, a slim, unripe promise of womanhood, her long hair plaited simply on her back, her face glowing with health, her eyes bright and shy. He felt unfit, uncouth--and yet she did not seem to see anything strange in his appearance, sudden as it had been. He realised that now at last he was face to face with a human being between whom and him the barrier of his disgrace did not stand. This child did not exalt him for his evil story, neither did she despise him--his crime simply did not exist. Its hideousness was not tricked out with tinsel and scarlet, as by the cads in the bar--it was just invisible, put away. Strange words thrilled faintly into his mind--"the remission of sins."