or a hate.  Time operates upon every human emotion as it operates upon physical life; and ten years left no single situation at Bridetown or Bridport unchallenged.  Death cut few knots; since accident willed that one alone fell among those with whom we are concerned.  For the rest, years brought their palliatives and corrosives, soothed here, fretted there; here buried old griefs and healed old sores; here calloused troubles, so that they only throbbed intermittently; here built up new enthusiasms, awakened new loves, barbed new enmities.

Things that looked impossible on the day that Ironsyde heard Sabina scorn him, happened.  Threats evaporated, danger signals disappeared; but, in other cases, while the jagged edges and peaks of bitterness and contempt were worn away by a decade of years, the solid rocks from which they sprang persisted and the massive reasons for emotion were not moved, albeit their sharpest expressions vanished.  Some loves faded into likings, and their raptures to a placid contentment, built as much on the convenience of habit as the memories of a passionate past; other affections, less fortunate, perished and left nothing but remains unlovely.  Hates also, with their sharpest bristles rubbed down, were modified to bluntness, and left a mere lumpish aversion of mind.  Some dislikes altogether perished and gave place to indifference; some persisted as the shadow of their former selves; some were kept alive by absurd pride in those who pretended, for their credit’s sake, a steadfastness they were not really built to feel.

Sabina, for example, was constitutionally unequal to any supreme and all-controlling passion unless it had been love; yet still she preserved that inimical attitude to Raymond Ironsyde she had promised to entertain; though in reality the fire was gone and the ashes cold.  She knew it, but was willing to rekindle the flame if material offered, as now it threatened to do.

Ernest Churchouse had published his book upon ‘The Bells of Dorset’ and, feeling that it represented his life work, declared himself content.  He had grown still less active, but found abundant interests in literature and friendship.  He undertook the instruction of Sabina’s son and, from time to time, reported upon the child.  His first friend was now Estelle Waldron, who, at this stage of her development, found the old and childlike man chime with her hopes and aspirations.

Estelle was passing through the phase not uncommon to one of her nature.  For a time her early womanhood found food in poetry, and her mind, apparently fashioned to advance the world’s welfare and add to human happiness, reposed as it seemed on an interlude of reading and the pursuit of beauty.  She developed fast to a point—­the point whereat she had established a library and common room for the Mill hands; the point at which the girls called her ‘Our Lady,’ and very honestly loved her for herself as well as for the good she brought them.  Now,