“I am what I conceive myself to be—­who can prove me to be anything else?  What am I then!  An educated man, with a mind—­an intelligence.  I have damaged it, but there it is—­still mine.”

His eyes wandered, during the Lesson, to the line of sculptured Statesmen in the north transept.  He had taken History honours, and his thoughts began to play with matter still stored in them:  an essay on Dizzy and Cobden he had written for a Cambridge club—­or Gladstone’s funeral, which he had seen as a boy of seventeen.  He had sat almost in this very place, with his mother, who had taken pains to bring him to see it as an historic spectacle which he might wish to remember.  A quiet, dull woman, his mother—­taciturn, and something of a bookworm.  She had never understood him, nor he her.  But she had occasionally shown moments of expansion and emotion, when the soul within glowed a little through its coverings; and he remembered the look in her eyes as the coffin disappeared into the earth, amid the black-coated throng of Lords and Commons.  She had been for years a great though silent worshipper of Mr. Gladstone, to the constant amusement of her Tory husband and sons.

Then, suddenly, a face, a woman’s pretty face, in the benches of the north transept, caught his eye, and with a leap, as of something unchained, the beast within him awoke.  It had reminded him of Rachel; and therewith the decent memories of the distant past disappeared, engulfed by the seething, ugly, mud-stained present.  He was again crouching on the hill-side, in the shelter of the holly, watching the scene within:  Rachel in that man’s arms!  Had the American seen him?  He remembered his own backward start of alarm, as Ellesborough suddenly turned and walked towards the window.  He had allowed himself, in his eagerness to see, to press too near.  He had exposed himself?  He did not really believe that he had been discovered—­unless the American was an uncommonly cool hand!  Any way, his retreat to the wooded cover of the hill had been prompt.  Once arrived in the thick plantation on the crest, he had thrown himself down exhausted.  But as he sat panting there, on the fringe of the wood, he had fancied voices and the flash of a light in the hollow beneath him.  These slight signs of movement, however, had quickly disappeared.  Darkness and silence resumed possession of the farm, and he had had no difficulty in finding his way unmolested through the trees to the main road, and to the little town, five miles nearer to London than Millsborough, at which he had taken a room, under his present name of Wilson.