rejoicing and Phoebe’s clinging content, he had been overwhelmed by a dense cloud of depression—­a sense as of being caught in something soft and too sweet that would not let him go and into which he sunk the more deeply for his instinctive protest.  Also the sheer impossibility of the thing affected him with a dream-like belief that it could not really have happened, or that at least something must occur to dissolve it.  Yet nothing did, not even the Parson’s frankly-expressed dismay.

Ishmael was very young, and in no sense a man of the world, and when he thought of what lay behind that kiss he had given Phoebe he felt her innocence had a right to demand of him that at least he should not retract what she had built upon it.  Also, Penwith being a very narrow and intimate track of land, the scandal for her if he had withdrawn and let the miller blaze his version abroad would have never been lived down.  A country which is a blind-alley has the advantage of immunity from tramps, but it has the disadvantages also of a place which cannot be a highway to other places.  Talk, interest, all the thoughts and emotions of life, of necessity beat back on themselves instead of passing on and dying, or being swamped in the affairs of the great world.  Phoebe, as the miller knew, was already the subject of censure among the stiffer matrons, whose sons were wont to hang round the mill like bees, and in his expressions of approval to Ishmael was mingled a subtle strain of warning, almost of menace.  And to himself as the days went by and Phoebe was always there for him to see and caress when he felt inclined, her yielding sweetness ever ready for him to draw on, her gentle stupidity hidden under her adoration, he admitted that he did not altogether want to withdraw.  After all, what did it matter?  Phoebe had many refinements of heart and temper which surely could be held to outweigh her little ignorances, and now that, with the removal of Blanche, the outer world was, he told himself, cut off from him, he refused to see that to ally himself with the Lenines of the mill mattered as much as the Parson, in his old-fashioned Toryism, seemed to think.  A woman takes her husband’s position; and as to that, what, he asked bitterly, was his position that any woman should want to share it?  Phoebe did want to; she had shown all her heart so plainly in that cry—­genuine in that she believed it herself; and Phoebe was kind and perilously sweet....  The days went on, and Vassie’s letter of argument and protest was less determined than it would have been if she herself had not been engrossed in her own affairs.  And stronger even that the dread of hurting Phoebe, of the terrible scenes that would of necessity occur, than his own loneliness, was the enemy within himself that every time he caressed Phoebe mounted to his brain and told him it was, after all, well worth while.

It fell to the Parson’s bitter lot to marry them in the early autumn of that year.  Archelaus had now been away a year, and he had neither come back nor written, and not till several months later did he suddenly reappear, after the habit of the born rover.