“You ought to be ashamed, Archelaus!” she complained.  “Oh, sometimes I think you’re the wickedest man in the world, that I do...!”

“Who’s made me so, then?  Who went and wed another man as soon as I’d gone off to make a fortune for her, eh?  Tell me that!”

“I don’t believe it; if it had been that you’d have told me.”

“How could I tell ’ee?  Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t any woman, have bidden me hold my tongue till I’d shown what I could do?  Would your Da have looked at I for a son?”

“Well, you can’t be heart-broken, anyway, or you wouldn’t be going to marry Senath Pollard....”

He came and bent over her again, bringing his face very close to hers and trying to hold her eyes with his look, as only a liar does.

“You knaw why I be walking out with Senath ... so as to be able to come here and have no one thinkin’ anything.  You knaw that as well as my tongue and heart can tell ’ee.  Look at me ... don’t ’ee knaw it, Phoebe?  Don’t ’ee?”

She turned her head this way and that to avoid his insistence, but at last she yielded as on that night long ago beside the stile and met look and lips.  “I don’t believe it,” she murmured in a choked whisper, her mouth against his; “but I’m a sinful woman, and there’s something in me wishes I could....”

She had come thus far, she whose total lack of moral sense had not suggested to her any reason why, having been the lover of one brother, she should not be the wife of the other; but her stereotyped views, missing the essentials, did revolt, though vainly, against his kisses when she was a wife, even while she burned beneath them.  She really was very miserable.  Suddenly he released her and leant back with a dark look on his face, a look she knew and dreaded.  She resorted to her little wiles to make him shake it off.

“Archelaus!...” she breathed, sliding her hand across his eyes; “don’t look like that....  To please me!” She pulled his head towards her and dropped light kisses on his lids to charm the expression out of his eyes, but he remained impassive.  She was in a condition when wiles leave a certain kind of man very untouched, and hate for Ishmael, not any charm left for him in her, urged his cunning love-making.

“I can’t go on weth it,” he declared; “it’s no good, Phoebe.  What does life hold for I now?  Last week I was down in the mine when there was a fall of rock, and for a bit we thought we’d never get out, and I said to myself what did it matter?... it’ll only save I the trouble of doen it for myself.”

“Archelaus!...”

“I put the barrel of my gun against my head t’other day and pulled the trigger, but it missed fire.  And then I dedn’t try again, because I thought all of a sudden that I must see you once more, Phoebe, and tell ’ee plain all about it—­what you and that husband of yours have driven a man to.”

“Don’t talk to me about Ishmael!  At least he’s a good man, so he is, and we’re neither of us fit to live along of him!”