‘Oh well,’ said Mrs. Stuart in her cheery commonsense way, ’that evening was such an overwhelming experience that I don’t suppose she could have felt any soreness towards anybody.  And, do you know, she is improved?  I don’t quite know what it is, but certainly one or two of those long scenes she does more intelligently, and even the death-scene is better,—­less monotonous.  I sometimes think she will surprise us all yet.’

‘Very likely,’ said Kendal absently, not in reality believing a word of it, but it was impossible to dissent.

‘I hope so,’ exclaimed Mrs. Stuart, ’with all my heart.  She has been very depressed often these last weeks, and certainly, on the whole, people have been harder upon her than they were at first.  I am so glad that she and your sister will meet in Venice.  Madame de Chateauvieux is just the friend she wants.’

Kendal walked home feeling the rankling of a fresh pin-point.  She had asked for him, and he had not been there!  What must she think, apparently, but that, from a sour, morose consistency, he had refused to be a witness of her triumph!

Oh, hostile fates!

* * * * *

A week later Eustace was settled in the Surrey farmhouse which had sheltered the Sunday League on its first expedition.  The Surrey country was in its full glory:  the first purple heather was fully out, and the distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson, broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper colour of the bracken.  The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless.  The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the constant skimming to and fro of the parent birds.  And under Kendal’s sitting-room window a pair of tomtits, which the party had watched that May Sunday, were just launching their young family on the world.  One of his first walks was to that spot beyond the pond where they had made their afternoon camping-ground.  The nut-hatches had fled—­fled, Kendal hoped, some time before, for the hand of the spoiler had been near their dwelling, and its fragments lay scattered on the ground.  He presently learnt to notice that he never heard the sharp sound of the bird’s tapping beak among the woods without a little start of recollection.

Outside his walks, his days were spent in continuous literary effort.  His book was in a condition which called for all his energies, and he threw himself vigorously into it.  The first weeks were taken up with a long review of Victor Hugo’s prose and poetry, with a view to a final critical result.  It seemed to him that there was stuff in the great Frenchman to suit all weathers and all skies.  There were sombre, wind-swept days, when the stretches of brown ling not yet in flower, the hurrying clouds, and the bending trees, were in harmony with all the