“I lay he’s never put himself in the power of a black-hearted, cruel beast like you,” blazed out the woman, furious and frightened at once.

“Has he not?  Ask him.  You don’t know where he was during those months?  I thought you didn’t.  I do.  Perhaps this child—­perhaps the other woman’s the married one—­”

Phoebe dropped her basket and her face grew very pale before the horrors thus coarsely spread before her.  She staggered and felt sick at the man’s last speech.  Then, with one great sob of breath, she turned her back on him, nerved herself to use her shaking legs, and set off at her best speed, as one running from some dangerous beast of the field.

Grimbal made no attempt to follow, but watched her fade into the mist, then turned and pursued his way through the dripping woodlands.  Sunrise fires gleamed along the upper layers of the fading vapours and gilded autumn’s handiwork.  Ripe seeds fell tapping through the gold of the horse-chestnuts, and many acorns also pattered down upon a growing carpet of leaves.  Webs and gossamers twinkled in the sunlight, and the flaming foliage made a pageant of colour through waning mists where red leaves and yellow fell at every breath along the thinning woods.  Beneath trees and hedgerows the ripe mosses gleamed, and coral and amber fungi, with amanita and other hooded folk.  In companies and clusters they sprang or arose misshapen, sinister, and alone.  Some were orange and orange-tawny; others white and purple; not a few peered forth livid, blotched, and speckled, as with venom spattered from some reptile’s jaws.  On the wreck of the year they flourished, sucked strange life from rotten stick and hollow tree, opened gills on lofty branch and bough, shone in the green grass rings of the meadows, thrust cup and cowl from the concourse of the dead leaves in ditches, clustered like the uprising roof-trees of a fairy village in dingle and in dene.

At the edge of the woods John Grimbal stood, and the hour was very dark for him and he cursed at the loss of his manhood.  His heart turned to gall before the thought of the thing he had done, as he blankly marvelled what unsuspected base instinct had thus disgraced him.  He had plumbed a possibility unknown within his own character, and before his shattered self-respect he stood half passionate, half amazed.  Chance had thus wrecked him; an impulse had altered the whole face of the problem; and he gritted his teeth as he thought of Blanchard’s feelings when Phoebe should tell her story.  As for her, she at least had respected him during the past years; but what must henceforth be her estimate of him?  He heaped bitter contempt upon himself for this brutality to a woman; he raged, as he pursued long chains of consequences begot of this single lapse of self-control.  His eye was cleared from passion; he saw the base nature of his action and judged himself as others would judge him.  This spectacle produced a definite mental