Felix, coming one day into his wife’s study—­for the house knew not the word drawing-room—­found Flora, with eyebrows lifted up and smiling lips, listening to Sheila proclaiming the doctrine that it was impossible not to live ‘on one’s own.’  Nothing else—­Felix learned—­was compatible with dignity, or even with peace of mind.  She had, therefore, taken a back room high up in a back street, in which she was going to live perfectly well on ten shillings a week; and, having thirty-two pounds saved up, she would be all right for a year, after which she would be able to earn her living.  The principle she purposed to keep before her eyes was that of committing herself to nothing which would seriously interfere with her work in life.  Somehow, it was impossible to look at this girl, with her glowing cheeks and her glowing eyes, and her hair frizzy from ardor, and to distrust her utterances.  Yes!  She would arrive, if not where she wanted, at all events somewhere; which, after all, was the great thing.  And in fact she did arrive the very next day in the back room high up in the back street, and neither Tod’s cottage nor the house on the Spaniard’s Road saw more than flying gleams of her, thenceforth.

Another by-product, this, of that little starting episode, the notice given to Tryst!  Strange how in life one little incident, one little piece of living stress, can attract and gather round it the feelings, thoughts, actions of people whose lives run far and wide away therefrom.  But episodes are thus potent only when charged with a significance that comes from the clash of the deepest instincts.

During the six weeks which had elapsed between his return home from Joyfields and the assizes, Felix had much leisure to reflect that if Lady Malloring had not caused Tryst to be warned that he could not marry his deceased wife’s sister and continue to stay on the estate—­the lives of Felix himself, his daughter, mother, brother, brother’s wife, their son and daughter, and in less degree of his other brothers, would have been free of a preoccupation little short of ludicrous in proportion to the face value of the cause.  But he had leisure, too, to reflect that in reality the issue involved in that tiny episode concerned human existence to its depths—­for, what was it but the simple, all-important question of human freedom?  The simple, all-important issue of how far men and women should try to rule the lives of others instead of trying only to rule their own, and how far those others should allow their lives to be so ruled?  This it was which gave that episode its power of attracting and affecting the thoughts, feelings, actions of so many people otherwise remote.  And though Felix was paternal enough to say to himself nearly all the time, ‘I can’t let Nedda get further into this mess!’ he was philosopher enough to tell himself, in the unfatherly balance of his hours, that the mess was caused by the fight best of all worth fighting—­of