From her next meeting with her lover, Olga came hack pale and wretched.

“I must go and live alone, mother,” she said.  “I must go to London and work.  This life would be impossible to me now.”

She would hear of nothing else.  Her marriage was postponed; they need say no more about it.  If her mother would let her have a little money, till she could support herself, she would be grateful; but she must live apart.  And so, after many tears it was decided.  Olga went by herself into lodgings, and Mrs. Hannaford accepted her brother’s invitation to Bryanston Square.

CHAPTER XIII

Piers Otway spent ten days in Yorkshire.  His father was well, but more than ever silent, sunk in prophetic brooding; Mrs. Otway kept the wonted tenor of her life, apprehensive for the purity of the Anglican Church (assailed by insidious papistry), and monologising at large to her inattentive husband upon the godlessness of his impenitent old age.

“Piers,” said the father one day, with a twinkle in his eye, “I find myself growing a little deaf.  Your stepmother is fond of saying that Providence sends blessings in disguise, and for once she seems to have hit upon a truth.”

On a glorious night of stars, he walked with his son up to the open moor.  A summer breeze whispered fitfully between the dark-blue vault and the grey earth; there was a sound of water that leapt from the bosom of the hills; deep answering to deep, infinite to infinite.  After standing silent for a while, Jerome Otway laid a hand on his companion’s shoulder, and muttered, “The creeds—­the dogmas!”

They had two or three long conversations.  Most of his time Piers spent in rambling alone about the moorland, for health and for weariness.  When unoccupied, he durst not be physically idle; the passions that ever lurked to frenzy him could only be baffled at such times by vigorous exercise.  His cold bath in the early morning was followed by play of dumb-bells.  He had made a cult of physical soundness; he looked anxiously at his lithe, well-moulded limbs; feebleness, disease, were the menaces of a supreme hope.  Ideal love dwells not in the soul alone, but in every vein and nerve and muscle of a frame strung to perfect service.  Would he win his heart’s desire?—­let him be worthy of it in body as in mind.  He pursued to excess the point of cleanliness.  With no touch of personal conceit, he excelled the perfumed exquisite in care for minute perfections.  Not in costume; on that score he was indifferent, once the conditions of health fulfilled.  His inherited tone was far from perfect; with rage he looked back upon those insensate years of study, which had weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying his constitution.  Only by conflict daily renewed did he keep in the way of safety; a natural indolence had ever to be combated; there was always the fear of relapse, such as had befallen