Not until he had escaped the tempest of voices, and was hidden from the world, did the bee-keeper allow his own cruel disappointment to appear.  Then, while his mother wept, he lifted up his voice and cursed God.  As his relations had won comfort by swearing at him, so now he soothed his soul unconsciously in blasphemies.  Then followed a silence, and his mother dared to blame him and remind him of an error.

“You wouldn’t turn the bee-butts when she died, though I begged and prayed of ‘e.  Oh, if you’d awnly done what an auld woman, an’ she your mother, had told ’e!  Not so much as a piece of crape would ’e suffer me to tie ’pon ’em.  An’ I knawed all the while the hidden power o’ bees.”

Presently he left her, and went to tell Chris. She greeted him eagerly, then turned pale and even terrified as she saw the black news in his face.

“Just a gull and laughing-stock for the gods again, that’s all, Chris. How easily they fool us from their thrones, don’t they?  And our pitiful hopes and ambitions and poor pathetic little plans for happiness shrivel and die, and strew their stinking corpses along the road that was going to be so gorgeous.  The time to spill the cup is when the lip begins to tremble and water for it—­not sooner—­the gods know!  And now all’s changed—­excepting only the memory of things done that had better been left undone.”

“But—­but we shall be married at once, Clem?”

He shook his head.

“How can you ask it?  My poor little all—­twenty pounds—­is gone on twopenny-halfpenny presents during the past week or two.  It seemed so little compared to the fortune that was coming.  It’s all over.  The great day is further off by twenty pounds than it was before that poor drunken old fool lied to me.  Yet she didn’t lie either; she only forgot; you can’t swim in brandy for nothing.”

Fear, not disappointment, dominated the woman before him as she heard.  Sheer terror made her grip his arm and scream to him hysterically.  Then she wept wild, savage tears and called to God to kill her quickly.  For a time she parried every question, but an outburst so strangely unlike Chris Blanchard had its roots deeper than the crushing temporary disaster which he had brought with him.  Clement, suspecting, importuned for the truth, gathered it from her, then passed away into the dusk, faced with the greatest problem that existence had as yet set him.  Crushed, and crushed unutterably, he returned home oppressed with a biting sense of his own damnable fate.  He moved as one distracted, incoherent, savage, alone.  The glorious palace he had raised for his happiness crumbled into vast ruins; hope was dead and putrid; and only the results of wild actions, achieved on false assumptions, faced him.  Now, rising out of his brief midsummer madness, the man saw a ghost; and he greeted it with groan as bitter as ever wrung human heart.

Miller Lyddon sat that night alone until Mr. Blee returned to supper.