“Please,” she whispered, “please, if you love me, leave me to myself.”

He left her; and her heart turned after him as he went, and blessed him.

“He is good, after all,” her heart said.

But Majendie’s heart had hardened.  He said to himself, “She is too much for me.”  As he lay awake thinking of her, he remembered Maggie.  He remembered that Maggie loved him, and that he had gone away from her and left her, because he loved Anne.  And now, because he loved Anne, he would go to Maggie.  He remembered that it was on Fridays that he used to go and see her.

Very well, to-morrow night would be Friday night.

To-morrow night he would go and see her.

And yet, when to-morrow night came, he did not go.  He never went until December, when Maggie’s postal orders left off coming.  Then he knew that Maggie was ill again.  She had been fretting.  He knew it; although, this time, she had not written to tell him so.

He went, and found Maggie perfectly well.  The postal orders had not come, because the last lady, the lady with the title, had not paid her.  Maggie was good as gold again, placid and at peace.

“Why,” he asked himself bitterly, “why did I not leave her to her peace?”

And a still more bitter voice answered, “Why not you, as well as anybody else?”

BOOK III

CHAPTER XXVIII

Eastward along the Humber, past the brown wharves and the great square blocks of the warehouses, past the tall chimneys and the docks with their thin pine-forest of masts, there lie the forlorn flat lands of Holderness.  Field after field, they stretch, lands level as water, only raised above the river by a fringe of turf and a belt of silt and sand.  Earth and water are of one form and of one colour, for, beyond the brown belt, the widening river lies like a brown furrowed field, with a clayey gleam on the crests of its furrows.  When the grey days come, water and earth and sky are one, and the river rolls sluggishly, as if shores and sky oppressed it, as if it took its motion from the dragging clouds.

Eleven miles from Scale a thin line of red roofs runs for a field’s length up the shore, marking the neck of the estuary.  It is the fishing hamlet of Fawlness.  Its one street lies on the flat fields low and straight as a dyke.

Beyond the hamlet there is a little spit of land, and beyond the spit of land a narrow creek.

Half a mile up the creek the path that follows it breaks off into the open country, and thins to a track across five fields.  It struggles to the gateway of a low, red-roofed, red-brick farm, and ends there.  The farm stands alone, and the fields around it are bare to the skyline.  Three tall elms stand side by side against it, sheltering it from the east, marking its humble place in the desolate land.  To the west a broad bridle-path joins the road to Fawlness.