brilliance, rolling down the water under her a fan-shaped river of brightness.

Some one stopped just behind Reynolds. He turned to see who it was who stood so close, and beheld his wife, in the cold clear glow, watching the moon.

SHE

CHAPTER XIII

AT RAMSGATE

HE stood so close that he could see the stars of the moonlight in her eyes. Her face was pale as marble in that sheen. She was dressed in dark clothes that expressed her figure, and her sailor hat was of coloured straw. She gave him no more heed than she bestowed on the people who passed. The lovely picture of the rising moon and its rippling reflection, and the black brig sulkily stemming and panting to the right of the flowing radiance in the sea, appeared to have fascinated her.

A sensation of tightness was about his heart, and its pulse throbbed half strangled. His throat grew dry as in fever, and the sudden passion of his spirit ran a momentary paralysis through him, and he stood as one seized with tetanus after taking poison. She was before him even as he had viewed her spiritually from his fissure in the dell, pallid in the star-white light that clothed her.

Who is the artist that can throw such a passage of life upon the mental gaze of his reader without shrinking from the dread of the derision that attends exaggeration ?

She passed on without noticing him, for this was a figure to court the male eye, and she was used to being stared at. He watched, and then followed her.

That "old mole i' th' earth," Goodhart ! Was his prophecy to be fulfilled? Was the old magic to exert the old spell now that she was there, stately in form, unchanged-unless the moon lied-by so much as a single stroke of the pencil of time?

She stopped again to look at the sea, and he halted and turned his back, again followed when she moved, and so kept her in sight down Augusta Road into the Bellevue Road, where she vanished. But he had marked the house she entered, and presently passed it and read the number. It was a road mainly of poor lodging-houses.

He returned to the esplanade and sat down to think. His heart had cooled; memory had flooded and chilled him as the night with its cold moisture descends upon the sea.

Moonlight makes all things beautiful. Says Words

worth

"The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare."

But it had not adorned the beauty of Lucretia by throwing over her its concealing ethereal veil of silver. In eight years she had not physically changed; he was sure of that. If materially she had not altered, why should he expect or hope that she had morally altered? What right had he to believe that her passionless nature was not still as frosty as it was eight years ago, with its ice-bleak presence of a form of chastity that was a distemper of mind? And if this was true, would it not be equally true to predict that the revelation of his identity, the confession of his individuality as Francis Reynolds would provoke precisely the same disgust, induce exactly the same horror

Q

and revulsion which had attended her marriage and made of her a moral phenomenon?

This was a consideration that brought his brows together, and his hand tightened upon his stick. For he knew himself well enough to understand that his self-respect as a man, that the honour in which it is the duty of every man to hold his own character, seeing that to the degree of honour a man does himself is the dignity of his manhood lifted, must fall irretrievably into ruin if he again courted and gained the aversion which had despatched her to her bedroom from the church, and filled his arms with the killing mockery of a phantom.

He resolved to pursue a course, and walked to the hotel. He entered the reading-room, and seated himself at a desk at a table and wrote to Mr. Wembly-Jones: "I am here, and by accident have discovered that the Mrs. Reynolds whom you were good enough to inquire about is lodging at 28, Belle Vue Road, in this town. Will you kindly send her the enclosed draft for £150, stating the facts as I related them to you, and oblige, etc.?" He signed the name of John Goodhart.

He mused a bit after writing and stamping his letter. Suppose, he thought, on receipt of this money Lucretia leaves Ramsgate? I may be unable to trace her again. And he plausibly represented to himself that his desire to hold her in view was because she was obviously poor and apparently alone and might want a friend. The judgment is always willing to be betrayed by one's tastes rather than be controlled by one's interests. He entered the hall and posted the letter.

"The morning," said a gentleman who next day was seated at breakfast at the same table with Reynolds, "is always the pleasantest part of the seaside in June,

when fine. The dip, then the breakfast, then the pipe. Where does tobacco discharge so delicate a richness, so nutty an aroma, as by the sea? The fresh fried sole for breakfast yields a sweetness and flavour it never delivers inland. There is a savouriness, by the sea, in the incense sent up by the dish of eggs and bacon which must often make the gods lament their divinity as a form of being which requires neither palate nor stomach."

This rhapsodist, who was rather deaf, and who had told Reynolds that he was a stockbroker with a great taste for literature, in which he had sought eminence without achieving it; this man who had informed Reynolds in the smoking-room that he had read Burton's "Anatomy" fourteen times, that he possessed the first folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, and that he had refused six hundred pounds for a collection of autographs from Wycliff to the Prince Consort, might have added to his list of the engaging pleasures of the seaside on a fine June morning, the breakfasting at an open window which frames a broad plain of water sparkling with sun-stars, over whose surface, firm ruled against the sky, glide shapes of steamer and sailing-ships-the solemn mail-boat, stately in sentiency of human life, of precious freight, of beautiful enginery, of elegance in mould of hull; the cargo tramp that, perceptive of the under-manned look-out aboard her, strains the eyes of her hawse-pipes at the sea from her rearing bows; that coster of the coast, the barge, discolouring the water under her with dyes of red mainsail and white topsail. Pleasant, also, is it to breakfast in the fanning of the fresh salt air, to the stealthy seething of waters upon the sands and rocks, to the thin undistracting orchestra composed of the town band afar, piano organs muffled