presently found, and stood observing it, with scowling interest, in the growing darkness. He had recognized the lovers down there. They were both youngsters of his parish. He made a detached mental resolve to talk tomorrow to the girl’s mother. These flirtations during the hay-harvest often led to trouble. There was just enough light left for him to remark some obscure lettering above the little locked door of this fanciful erection. It annoyed him that he could not read it. With trembling hand he fumbled in his pocket--produced a match-box and lit a match. There was no difficulty now in reading what it had been the humour of some eighteenth century Seldom to have carved on this site of the discovery of the Holy Rood. “Carpe Diem” he spelt out, before the flutterings of an agitated moth extinguished the light he held. This then was the oracle he had climbed the sacred Mount to hear! With quick steps, steps over which his mind seemed no longer to have control, he returned to his point of observation. The boy and girl had disappeared, but Vennie Seldom was still visible in her white dress, pacing up and down the meadow. What was she doing there?--he wondered. Did she often slip away, after the little formal dinner with her mother, and wander at large through the evening shadows? An unaccountable rage against her besieged his heart. He felt he should soon begin to hate her if he watched her much longer; so, with a more collected and calm step and a sigh that rose from the depths of his soul he moved away to where the path descended. As it happened, however, the path he had to follow now, for it was too dark to return as he had come, emerged, after many windings round the circle of the hill, precisely into the very field, in which Vennie was walking. He moved straight towards her. She gave a little start when she saw him, but waited passively, in that patient drooping pose so natural to her, till he was by her side. “You too,” she said, touching his hand, “feel the necessity of being alone a little while before the day ends. I always do. Mother sometimes protests. But it is no good. There are certain little pleasures that we have a right to enjoy--haven’t we?” They moved together along the base of the hill following its circuit in the northerly direction. Clavering felt as though, after a backward plunge into the Inferno, he had encountered a reproachful angel of light. He half expected her to say to him, in the crushing austerity of Beatrice, “Lift up your chin and answer me face to face.” The gentle power of her pure spirit over him was so persuasive that in the after-ebb of this second turbulent reaction he could not refrain from striking the confessional note. “I wish I were as good as you, Miss Seldom,” he said. “I fear the power of evil in me goes beyond anything you could possibly conceive.”