smaller people in Brookshire, little Mr. Burridge was aware of no reason whatever why Westall’s employers should not know that, although Mr. Wharton was working up the defence with an energy and ability which set Burridge marvelling, it was still his, Burridge’s opinion, that everything that could be advanced would be wholly unavailing with the jury; that the evidence, as it came into final shape, looked worse for Hurd rather than better; and that the only hope for the man lay in the after-movement for reprieve which can always be got up in a game-preserving case.

“And is as a rule political and anti-landlord,” thought Aldous, on one of these mornings, as he rode along the edge of the down.  He foresaw exactly what would happen.  As he envisaged the immediate future, he saw one figure as the centre of it—­not Marcella, but Wharton!  Wharton was defending, Wharton would organise the petition, Wharton would apply for his own support and his grandfather’s, through Marcella.  To Wharton would belong not only the popular kudos of the matter, but much more, and above all, Marcella’s gratitude.

Aldous pulled up his horse an instant, recognising that spot in the road, that downward stretching glade among the beeches, where he had asked Marcella to be his wife.  The pale February sunlight was spreading from his left hand through the bare grey trunks, and over the distant shoulders of the woods, far into the white and purple of the chalk plain.  Sounds of labour came from the distant fields; sounds of winter birds from the branches round him.  The place, the time, raised in him all the intensest powers of consciousness.  He saw himself as the man standing midway in everything—­speculation, politics, sympathies—­as the perennially ineffective and, as it seemed to his morbid mood, the perennially defeated type, beside the Whartons of this world.  Wharton!  He knew him—­had read him long ago—­read him afresh of late.  Raeburn’s lip showed the contempt, the bitterness which the philosopher could not repress, showed also the humiliation of the lover.  Here was he, banished from Marcella; here was Wharton, in possession of her mind and sympathies, busily forging a link—­

“It shall be broken!” said Raeburn to himself with a sudden fierce concentration of will.  “So much I will claim—­and enforce.”

But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence.  He gathered himself together with a long breath, and went his way.

* * * * *

For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing.  The moral debate was strenuous enough.  The murders had roused all the humane and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like avenging Erinnyes.  Hallin’s remark that “game-preserving creates