Recoiling from this, he was at once resumed by Mrs. Skelmersdale.  Who had in fact an effect of really never having been out of the room.  But now he became penitent about her.  His penitence expanded until it was on a nightmare scale.  At last it blotted out the heavens.  He felt like one of those unfortunate victims of religious mania who are convinced they have committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. (Why had he gone there to lunch?  That was the key to it.  Why had he gone there to lunch?) . . .  He began to have remorse for everything, for everything he had ever done, for everything he had ever not done, for everything in the world.  In a moment of lucidity he even had remorse for drinking that stout honest cup of black coffee. . . .

And so on and so on and so on. . . .

When daylight came it found Benham still wide awake.  Things crept mournfully out of the darkness into a reproachful clearness.  The sound of birds that had been so delightful on the yesterday was now no longer agreeable.  The thrushes, he thought, repeated themselves a great deal.

He fell asleep as it seemed only a few minutes before the landlord, accompanied by a great smell of frying bacon, came to call him.

18

The second day opened rather dully for Benham.  There was not an idea left in his head about anything in the world.  It was—­Solid.  He walked through Bramley and Godalming and Witley and so came out upon the purple waste of Hindhead.  He strayed away from the road and found a sunny place of turf amidst the heather and lay down and slept for an hour or so.  He arose refreshed.  He got some food at the Huts Inn on the Hindhead crest and went on across sunlit heathery wildernesses variegated by patches of spruce and fir and silver birch.  And then suddenly his mental inanition was at an end and his thoughts were wide and brave again.  He was astonished that for a moment he could have forgotten that he was vowed to the splendid life.

“Continence by preoccupation;” he tried the phrase. . . .

“A man must not give in to fear; neither must he give in to sex.  It’s the same thing really.  The misleading of instinct.”

This set the key of his thought throughout the afternoon—­until Amanda happened to him.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

AMANDA

1

Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.

From Haslemere he had gone on to further heaths and gorse beyond Liphook, and thence he had wandered into a pretty district beset with Hartings.  He had found himself upon a sandy ridge looking very beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt was Harting Coombe; he had been through a West Harting and a South Harting and read finger-posts pointing to others of the clan; and in the evening, at the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat down to consider