pane of glass; and on again over brook and fence, plowed field and meadow, till Meadows found himself, he scarce knew how, at his own door.  His old deaf servant came out from the stable-yard and gazed in astonishment at the mare, whose flank panted, whose tail quivered, whose back looked as if she had been in the river, while her belly was stained with half a dozen different kinds of soil, and her rider’s face streamed with blood from a dozen scratches he had never felt.

Meadows flung himself from the saddle and ran up to his own room.  He dashed his face and his burning hands into water; this seemed to do him a little good.  He came downstairs; he lighted a pipe (we are the children of habit); he sat with his eyebrows painfully bent.  People called on him; he fiercely refused to see them.

For the first time in his life he turned his back on business.  He sat for hours by the fireplace.  A fierce mental struggle wrenched him to and fro.

Evening came, still he sat collapsed by the fireplace.  From his window, among other objects, two dwellings were visible; one, distant four miles, was a whitewashed cottage, tiled instead of thatched, adorned with creepers and roses and very clean, but in other respects little superior to laborers’ cottages.

The other, distant six long miles, was the Grassmere farmhouse, where the Mertons lived; the windows seemed burnished gold this evening.

In the small cottage lived a plain old woman—­a Methodist.  She was Meadows’ mother.

She did not admire worldly people, still less envied them.

He was too good a churchman and man of business to permit conventicles or psalm-singing at odd hours in his house.  So she preferred living in her own, which moreover was her own—­her very own.

The old woman never spoke of her son, and checked all complaints of him, and snubbed all experimental eulogies of him.

Meadows never spoke of his mother, paid her a small allowance with the regularity and affectionate grace of clock-work; never asked her if she didn’t want any more—­would not have refused her if she had asked for double.

This evening, while the sun was shining with all his evening glory on Susan Merton’s house, Meadows went slowly to his window and pulled down the blind, and drawing his breath hard shut the loved prospect out.

He then laid his hand upon the table, and he said:  “I swear by the holy bread and wine I took last month that I will not put myself in the way of this strong temptation.  I swear I will go no more to Grassmere Farm, never so long as I love Susan.”  He added faintly, “Unless they send for me, and they won’t do that, and I won’t go of my own accord, I swear it.  I have sworn it, however, and I swear it again—­unless they send for me!”

Then he sat by the fire with his head in his hands—­a posture he never was seen in before.  Next he wrote a note and sent it hastily with a horse and cart to that small whitewashed cottage.