V + 

Andrews put the closed knife back into his pocket. The dark which had been cold to him grew warm with friendliness. He was overwhelmed with an immense gratitude, so that he was unwilling to open the door and remind Elizabeth of his presence. She was as unapproachable to him in this mood as a picture, as holy as a vision. He remembered his first entrance to the cottage and his last sight of her before he sank exhausted, the pale resolute face set between two yellow flames. + 

Quietly as though he were in the presence of a mystery he turned the handle of the door and remained on the threshold unresolved and diffident. She was standing by the table cleaning the cups and plates which they had left. + 

“Is that you?” she said, without looking up. “Put these in the cupboard,” and when he had obeyed her she returned to the fire and bending down to poke the coals murmured with a half-amused asperity, “A couple of fools.” + 

Andrews shifted from one foot to another. He found, faced by this devastating matter of factness, an inability to utter his thanks. He plucked nervously at a button and at last burst out in a tone almost of resentment, “I’m grateful.” + 

“But what’s it all about?” she asked spreading out her hands in a gesture of humorous perplexity. “I hate mysteries,” she added, herself mysteriously brooding behind dark eyes flecked only on the surface by amusement. + 

“Didn’t you hear what he said?” Andrews replied and muttered in so low a tone that Elizabeth was forced to lean forward to catch his words, “A sort of Judas.” + 

“Do you expect me to believe all that he said,” she stared at Andrews in wide-eyed, innocent astonishment. “He’s your enemy.” + 

“Would you believe what I said?” he asked with angry foreknowledge of the answer. + 

“Of course,” she said. “Tell me.” + 

He watched her in amazement. All his sentimental melodramatic instincts rose up in him to take advantage of the occasion. O, the blessed relief, he thought, to stumble forward, go down on my knees to her, weep, say “I am tired out. A hunted man pursued by worse than death.” He could hear his own voice break on the phrase. But as he was about to obey those instincts, that other hard, critical self spoke with unexpected distinctness. “You fool, she’ll see through that. Haven’t you enough gratitude to speak the truth?” But then, he protested, I lose all chance of being comforted. But when he looked at her, the critic won. He stood where he was with hands clasped behind his back and head a little bent, but eyes staring intently, angrily for the first sign of contempt. + 

“It’s all true,” he said. + 

“Tell me,” she repeated. + 

“It’s not a story which would interest you,” he protested, in a vain hope of avoiding further humiliation. + 

She sat down and leaning her chin on her hand watched him with a friendly amusement. + 

“You must earn your night’s lodging with the story,” she said. “Come here.” + 

“No,” he clung as a desperate resort to a position in which he could at least look physically down upon her. “If I must speak, I’ll speak here.” + 

He twisted a button round and round till it dangled loosely on its cotton stalk. He did not know how to begin. He shut his eyes and plunged into a rapid current of words. + 

“We were running spirits from France,” he said, “and I betrayed them. That’s all there is to it. I wrote to the Customs officer at Shoreham and gave a date and an hour and a place. When we landed the gaugers were waiting for us. There was a fight, but I slipped away. It seems that a gauger was killed.” He opened his eyes and gazed at her angrily. “Don’t dare to despise me,” he said. “You don’t know why I did it, my thoughts, feelings. I’m a coward, I know, and none of you can understand a coward. You are all so brave and quiet, peaceful.” + 

She took no notice of his angry outburst, but watched him thoughtfully. “I wonder why you did it?” she answered. + 

He shook his head and answered in a kind of deep hopefulness, “You wouldn’t understand.” + 

“But why,” Elizabeth asked, “did you ever start smuggling? You are not made for that work.” + 

“My father was a smuggler,” Andrews said. “A common, bullying smuggler, but damnably clever. He saved money on it and sent me to school. What was the use of having me taught Greek, if I was to spend my life like this?” and his hand in its vague comprehensive gesture included the bare room, the cold night, his muddy clothes and fear. He came a little nearer to the fire. + 

“I will tell you why he sent me to school,” he said, leaning forward as though to impart a confidence. “It was so that he could brag about it. He was proud of his success. He was never caught and they never had any evidence against him. His crew worshipped him. I tell you he’s become a legend on this coast. I’ve never dared to say these things about him to anyone but you. And all the time I was at sea, I could see how they wondered that such a mountain could bring forth such a mouse.” + 

“Why do you hate your father so?” Elizabeth asked. “Is it because of this?” and with her hand she imitated the comprehensive gesture which he had made a minute before. + 

“Oh, no,” he said, “no.” He watched her with a despairing intentness and a hopeless longing for some sign of comprehension. He pleaded with her not as an advocate to a jury but as a prisoner already condemned to his judge. “You can’t understand,” he said, “what life was like with these men. I could do nothing which was not weighed up with my father and found wanting. They kept on telling me of his courage, of what he would have done, what a hero he was. And I knew all the time things they didn’t know, how he had beaten my mother, of his conceit, his ignorance, his beastly bullying ways. They gave me up in the end,” he said smiling without any gaiety. “I was of no account. They were kind to me, charitably, because that man was my father.” + 

“But why, why,” she asked, “did you ever mix yourself up with them?” + 

“That was Carlyon,” he said softly, wondering whether the twisted feeling at his heart when he uttered the name was love or hate. It was at any rate something bitter and irrevocable. + 

“The man who was here?” + 

“Yes,” Andrews said. “My father was killed at sea and they dropped the body overboard, so that even when he was dead, the law had no evidence against him. I was at school. My mother died a couple of years before. I think he broke her heart, if there’s such a thing as a broken heart. He broke her body anyway.” Andrews’s face grew white as though from the blinding heat of an inner fire. “I loved my mother,” he said. “She was a quiet pale woman who loved flowers. We used to go for walks together in the holidays and collect them from the hedges and ditches. Then we would press them and put them in an album. Once my father was at home⁠—he had been drinking, I think⁠—and he found us. We were so busy that we didn’t hear him when he called. He came and tore the leaves out of the album and scrumpled them in his fists, great unwieldy fists. He was unwieldy altogether, large, clumsy, bearded, but with a quick cunning brain and small eyes.” + 

“Why did your mother marry him?” Elizabeth asked. + 

“They eloped,” Andrews said. “My mother was incurably romantic.” + 

“And when your father died?” + 

“That was more than three years ago,” Andrews continued in a tone as tired as though he were speaking of three centuries. “I was finishing school, and Carlyon brought the news. I was glad. You see it appeared to me to mean the end of fear. My father used to beat me unmercifully, because he said it would put courage into me. I think he was a little mad towards the end. My mother’s death frightened him, for he was superstitious. When I heard that he was dead, I thought it was the beginning of a life of peace.” + 

“And why not?” Elizabeth asked. “Why this?” + 

He bent his head sullenly. “I was alone,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what to do. Carlyon asked me to come back with him and I went.” He raised his head and said fiercely, “Can’t you understand? You’ve seen the man for yourself? There’s something about him⁠ ⁠… I was a boy,” he added as though he was an old man discussing a far distant past. “Perhaps I was romantic like my mother. God knows I ought to be cured of that now. He was brave, adventurous and yet he loved music and the things which I loved, colours, scents, all that part of me which I could not speak of at school or to my father. I went with Carlyon. What a fool I was. How could I be such a fool?” + 

She screwed up her mouth as though at a wry taste. “Yes, but the betrayal?” she said. + 

He drew himself up, moving a little away. “I don’t expect anyone to understand that,” he said. He gave a momentary impression of great dignity, which he spoilt by an immediate capitulation. “You can’t realise the life I came to,” he said. “There were storms and I was seasick. There were periods of nightlong waiting off the coast for signals which did not come and I could not help showing my nerves. And there was no hope of any change, of any peace at last except death. My father had left his boat and every penny he had saved to Carlyon. That was why Carlyon came to me in Devon. He was curious to see the neglected son, and then I suppose he took pity on me. I believe he liked me,” Andrews added slowly and regretfully with another painful twist at the heart. + 

“I thought my father was dead,” he continued, “but I soon found that he had followed me on board. The first member of the crew I met as I was hauled, pushed behind and pulled in front, on to the boat, was Joe, a fat, big, clumsy, stupid creature, a prize bull of a man. ‘You’ll soon get your sea legs, sir,’ he said to me, ‘if you are your father’s son.’ They worshipped my father, all except a little wizened half-witted youth called Tims, whom my father had made his personal servant. My father, I suppose, had bullied him. He used to watch me slyly from a distance with a mixture of hatred and fear until he realised that I wasn’t ‘my father’s son,’ when he began to treat me with familiarity, because we had both suffered from the same hand.” Andrews paused, then began again with an exaggerated irony which did not disguise his own sense of shame. “They all soon realised that I wasn’t like my father, but they remained kind and only told me about six times a day what my father would have done in such and such a case. I used to take refuge with Carlyon. He never mentioned my father to me.” + 

Andrews had been speaking calmly, but with a strained note in his voice. Now he lost control of himself. “If I’m a coward,” he cried, “haven’t I a mind? Wasn’t my brain of any use to them that they should treat me like a child, never ask my opinion, have me there on sufferance only, because of my father and because Carlyon willed it? I’m as good as Carlyon. Haven’t I outwitted the fool now?” he ejaculated in hysterical triumph, and then fell silent before Elizabeth’s quiet passivity, remembering how she had lifted the cup to her lips and filled him with humility, as he crouched in the dark. Now he wished that she would speak, accuse him in so many words of ingratitude, rather than arraign him in silence before peaceful eyes. He grew resentful of her silence and fidgeted with his hands. “I’ve shown them that I’m of importance now,” he said. + 

Elizabeth raised her hand to her head as though she felt an ache there. “So it was hate again,” she said in a tired voice. “There seems to be hate everywhere.” + 

Andrews stared at her in amazement. On what had seemed the illimitable peace of her mind had appeared the cloud small as a man’s hand. For the first time a sense reached him of an unhappiness which was not his own. Watching the white face propped up on small clenched fists and touched only on the surface by the fire’s glow, he grew indignant with the world, with the dark which surrounded them, with fear, uneasiness, anything which could mar her perfect happiness. “She is a saint,” he thought, remembering with a heart still half inclined to sentimental tears of gratitude the manner in which she had saved him from Carlyon. + 

He came a little nearer very cautiously, with a desire quite alien to his nature not to intrude on a sorrow which he could not share. “It is the dead man,” he thought and became aware of a feeling of despairing jealousy. “It’s true then,” his second self whispered, “always hate.” + 

“No,” he said out loud, speaking partly to her and partly to that other self, “not here. Hate’s not here,” and when she looked up at him with a puzzled frown, he added, “I’m grateful.” The poverty of his words! He grew aware of himself as a large, coarse body with soiled clothes and burst out indignantly, “It’s not fair that you should be touched by this.” Suddenly in spirit he stretched out both hands to his own critic and begged him to take control, if only for a few minutes, of his actions. He said to Elizabeth, “It’s my fault. I know that. Perhaps it’s not too late. I’ll go now⁠—this instant,” and he turned hesitatingly and looked with shuddering distaste at the cold night outside. There was a suitable dwelling place for hate and there he would take it, leaving again in security this small warm room and its white occupant. Yet he did not want to go. It was not only that outside Carlyon and his two companions sought him, but that inside he would leave someone who seemed to carry far behind her eyes, glimpsed only obscurely and at whiles, the promise of his two selves at one, the peace which he had discovered sometimes in music. + 

He stood shamefully hesitating, the strength of his resolution exhausted in his words. “You needn’t go,” she said. “You haven’t done me any harm,” and seeing that he had not been affected by her unenthusiastic statement she added reluctantly, “I don’t want you to go.” + 

Andrews looked round at her. “Do you mean that?” he asked. + 

“Oh, it’s not your fascinating self,” she said, with gentle mockery. “But I’m tired of being alone. I haven’t even the body with me now.” + 

“No, but the spirit?” he burst out, wilfully misunderstanding her words, seeing her body as a fragile and beautiful casing, which just succeeded in enclosing her lightly poised spirit that spoke in turn with mockery, friendship, sorrow, laughter and always with a pervading undertone of peace. + 

She did not understand. “I don’t know where that is,” she said. “It will keep me safe anyway. I’ve said he was jealous, didn’t I? If you were drunk and full of lust,” she added with an outspokenness which startled Andrews, “I should be safe.” + 

“Yes, from anything of that kind, perhaps,” Andrews said, “but from death?” + 

Elizabeth laughed. “Oh, I never thought of that,” she said. “When I’m old will be time enough.” + 

“How wonderful,” Andrews said thoughtfully, “to live like that without the fear of death. You must be very brave. You are all alone here.” He had completely forgotten his resolution to go, and now with sudden but not offensive familiarity he sat down on the floor by her feet and let the fire light up the wonder in his face to a warm glow. To Elizabeth it seemed that the lines with which fear had falsely aged his face were smoothed away, and it was a boy’s face which watched her with a boy’s enthusiasm. She smiled. “Not bravery but custom,” she said. + 

He leant forward towards her, watching her face intently as though he were unwilling to miss the least shade, the smallest movement of the hidden muscles, the slightest change in the colour of what he began to consider in his heart were faultless eyes. “I’ve told you my story,” he said. “Tell me yours. You say that I can stay the night here and it’s too early for sleep.” + 

“It’s not an interesting story,” Elizabeth said. “I have always lived here. I’ve never been further away than to school at Shoreham.” + 

“And that man⁠—who’s dead?” Andrews asked, again with the puzzling twinge of jealousy. + 

“I was here first,” she said, as though she claimed like Venus priority over death. “I was born here, I think, but I can’t remember who my father was. I think he must have died or left my mother. What money there was came from my grandfather, a rich farmer as wealth is considered in these parts. As for the rest my mother took in lodgers, when she could get them, and when she failed, there was a little less to eat, that was all.” + 

“And that man?” Andrews repeated again with a stubborn boyish intentness. + 

She smiled. “You are very interested in him,” she said. “He was one of my mother’s lodgers. He worked at Shoreham with the Customs, a clerk in the office. That didn’t make him popular in this neighbourhood, where, as you must know, everyone has a cellar and everyone is at the beck and call of the Gentlemen. He was an outcast, the more so as he lived out here away from his own kind in the town. That puzzled me for a long time. He never knew anyone, partly from choice, partly from necessity. The strange thing was that he was able suddenly to retire with enough money to live on for the rest of his life. + 

“I remember the day. I was about ten years old. We lived a very close life, you know, in this cottage. This was our only living room. Above here are two rooms,” and she pointed to a small door on the left of the fireplace. “My mother and I slept in one, and Mr. Jennings⁠—that was the name we knew him by⁠—in another. He would be in to breakfast and supper and we ate with him down here. But after supper, because he was a quiet, brooding man who did not seem to care for company, we would take any work we had to do upstairs to our bedroom. I don’t know what he did all by himself but think and perhaps sleep in a chair by the fire, but sometimes I would wake in the very middle of the night and hear him going to his room. Perhaps he was one of those poor people who find it hard to sleep. You saw his face. Don’t you think there was something sleepless about it?” + 

“It was a cunning wicked face, I thought,” Andrews said. + 

“Oh, no,” Elizabeth protested, without anger. “He was cunning perhaps, but he was not wicked. He was kind to me in his own way,” and she brooded for a moment on the past with a frown of perplexity. + 

“Well, one night,” she said, “after supper we were rising as usual to go upstairs, when he asked us to stay. It seemed astonishing to me, but my mother was quite undisturbed. She was a fatalist, you know, and it made her very serene but altogether unpurposeful. We stayed sitting there, I impatient to know the reason, but my mother apparently entirely uninterested. She took up her work and began to sew, as if it had always been her custom to work in this room. After a while he spoke. ‘I’ve been very comfortable here,’ he said. My mother looked up and said, ‘Thank you,’ and went on with her sewing. Her answer seemed odd to me. I felt that he should have thanked her, not she him.” + 

“Was your mother pale and lovely,” Andrews asked, “with dark hair and quiet eyes?” + 

“She was dark,” Elizabeth said, “but plump and with a lot of colour in her cheeks.” + 

“You have colour in your cheeks,” Andrews said thoughtfully, not as though he were paying a compliment but as though he were dispassionately discussing an inanimate beauty, “but it is on a white background, like a flower fallen on snow.” + 

Elizabeth smiled a little, but paid no other attention to him. “Mr. Jennings,” she said, “bit his thumbnail⁠—a habit with him⁠—and watched my mother suspiciously. ‘You’ll die one day,’ he continued. ‘What will happen to this cottage then?’ I watched my mother in a still fright, half expecting her to die there and then before my eyes. ‘It will be sold,’ she said, ‘for the child here.’ ‘Suppose,’ Mr. Jennings said, ‘you sell to me now,’ and then, because he thought my mother was going to make some amazed comment, he continued very hurriedly, ‘I will give you your price, and you shall stay on here with your child as long as you like. You can invest the money to the child’s advantage. I am very comfortable here, and I don’t want the risk of being turned away when you die.’ It was astonishing the quiet way in which he assumed that she would die first, although they were both much of an age. I don’t know whether he could see some trace of sickness in her which I could not see, but she died within the year. Of course, she had taken the offer.” + 

Something rather the reflection of sorrow than sorrow itself crossed Elizabeth’s face, and she went on with her story with an air of hurry and a somewhat forced abstraction. “He seemed hardly to notice that my mother was dead,” she said. “I stayed and cooked his meals as my mother had done and swept the floors. For some weeks I was afraid that he would turn me out, but he never did. Every week he gave me money for the house, and I never had to touch what my mother left me. He no longer went to work and he would spend his time in long walks along the top of the downs or in sitting beside the fire reading the Bible. I don’t think he ever read it consecutively. He would open it at random and put his thumb on a passage. When what he found pleased him he would read on, and when it displeased him he would fling the book aside and go for another of his long walks, until he came back tired and weary looking like a beaten dog. He very seldom spoke to me. + 

“It was a very lonely life for a child and one day I picked up my courage and asked whether I could go to school again. He wanted to know how much it would cost and when he found how little it would be he sent me off and even gave me a note to the mistress, asking that they should pay particular attention to Scripture. From that time on he paid me more attention. I would read to him in the evening and sometimes even argue small theological points.” + 

“What a strange, staid child you must have been,” Andrews said. + 

“Oh no,” Elizabeth laughed protestingly. “I was like all children. There were times of rebellion, when I would disappear down into Shoreham to play with other children or go to an entertainment, a circus or a fair. At first he would not notice my absence, which was humiliating, but after I had begun my Bible readings he grew more particular and sometimes beat me. Sometimes, too, at meals I’d look up and find him watching me.” + 

Again Andrews felt that absurd twinge of jealousy. “How could he be satisfied with watching you through those years?” he broke out. + 

“I was a child,” she said simply in final answer and then added slowly, “He was very much taken up with his soul.” + 

Andrews laughed harshly, remembering the little cunning lines around the mouth, the stubbly untidy beard, the coarse lids. “He must have had need,” he said. He longed to be able to shatter any feeling of friendship or gratitude which Elizabeth might still feel for the dead man. + 

Her eyes sparkled and she raised her chin in a small belligerent gesture. “No one could have called him a Judas,” she said. + 

Andrews knelt up on the floor with clenched fists. He was filled with a childish personal animosity for the dead man. “I have not a penny in the world,” he said. “I ask you⁠—what have I gained? Is this so much? But he⁠—where did he get his money?” + 

“I learned that later,” Elizabeth said quietly, her voice falling like the touch of cool fingers on a hot, aching brow. “He had cheated his employers, that was all. One day I opened the Bible at random as usual and began to read. It was the parable of the unjust steward. I felt, though I was looking at the page and not at him, that he was listening with unusual intentness. When I reached the point where the steward calls his lord’s debtors and says to the first: How much dost thou owe my lord; and he says: a hundred barrels of oil; and the steward says: Take the bill and sit down quickly and write fifty; when I reached that point Mr. Jennings⁠—I never called him anything else⁠—gave a sort of gasp of wonder. I looked up. He was staring at me with a mixture of fear and suspicion. ‘Does it say that there,’ he asked, ‘or are you making it up?’ ‘How could I make it up?’ I said. ‘People gossip so,’ he answered, ‘go on,’ and he listened hard, sitting forward a little in the chair. When I read ‘And the Lord commended the unjust steward, for as much as he had done wisely,’ he interrupted me again. ‘Do you hear that?’ he said, and gave a sigh of satisfaction and relief. He watched me for a little with his eyes screwed up. ‘I’ve been worrying,’ he said at last, ‘but that’s at an end. The Lord has commended me.’ + 

“I said, ‘But you are not the unjust steward,’ and added with a trace of conceit, ‘and anyway this is a parable.’ + 

“Mr. Jennings told me to close the Bible and put it away. ‘It’s no use talking,’ he said, ‘you can’t get over scripture. It’s strange,’ he added. ‘I never thought I was doing right.’ + 

“He told me then, sure in the Lord’s approval, how he had earned the money on which he had retired. All the time that he was a clerk in the Customs he was in receipt of an income from certain seamen, who had not the courage to become regular smugglers. They would declare about three quarters of the amount of spirit they carried, and Mr. Jennings would check their cargo and turn a blind eye on what they had not declared. Can’t you imagine him,” she said with a laugh, “picking his way delicately among the cases of spirit, noting carefully a certain proportion? But unlike the unjust steward for a hundred barrels he would write seventy-five, and if that particular captain’s payments to him were in arrears, he would even put down the full hundred as a warning. Then he would go home and open the Bible at random and read perhaps some terrifying prophecy of hell fire and be in a panic for hours. But after he had heard the parable of the unjust steward, he never asked me to read the Bible to him again and I never saw him open the Book. He was comforted and perhaps he feared to find a contradictory passage. He was cunning, I suppose, and wicked in his way, but he had a childish heart.” + 

“Was he as blind as a child?” Andrews asked. “Couldn’t he see that you were beautiful?” He knelt with clenched fists before her with eyes half shut as though he were battered by contrary winds, by admiration, wonder, suspicion, jealousy, love. “Yes, I am in love,” he said to himself, with sadness and not with exaltation. “But are you, are you, are you?” the inner critic mocked him. “It’s just the old lusts. This is not Gretel. Would you sacrifice yourself for her? You know that you wouldn’t. You love yourself too dearly. You want to possess her, that is all.” “Oh be quiet and let me think,” he implored. “You are wrong. I am a coward. You cannot expect me to change my spots so soon. But this is not the old lust. There is something holy here,” and as though exorcised the critic fell again into silence. + 

Elizabeth smiled wryly. “Am I beautiful?” she asked, and then with a sudden, vehement bitterness, “If it’s beauty which makes men cease to be blind as children, I don’t want it. It only means unhappiness. He was unhappy at the end. One day a year ago⁠—it was just before my eighteenth birthday⁠—I rebelled more than usual against the loneliness of life here. I disappeared in the morning early before he got up and left his breakfast unmade. I didn’t return till quite late at night. I was really frightened at my own action. I had never broken away quite so drastically before. I opened the door of this room very quietly and saw him asleep in front of the fire. He had made himself some supper, but he had hardly touched it, and the poverty and untidiness of it touched me. I nearly went across to him and apologised, but I was afraid, so I slipped off my shoes and got to my room without waking him. It must have been after midnight. I had just taken off my clothes, when he opened the door suddenly. He had a strap in his hand and I could see that he meant to beat me. I snatched at a sheet from my bed to cover myself. He had a very angry look in his eyes, but it changed in one moment to amazement. He dropped the strap and put out his hands. I thought he was going to take me in his arms and I screamed. Then he lowered his hands and went out, slamming the door. I remember that I picked up the strap and fingered it and tried to feel thankful that I had not been beaten. But I knew that I would have been grateful for a beating in place of the new uneasiness.” + 

“Do you mean,” Andrews asked, “that you are not yet twenty?” + 

“Do I look more?” Elizabeth asked. + 

“Oh no, it’s not that,” he said. “But you seem so wise⁠—understanding. As if you knew as much as any woman who had ever been born and were yet not bitter about it.” + 

“I have learned a lot in the last year,” she replied. “Perhaps before I was rebellious, unwise, but wasn’t I younger?” she asked with a sad laugh. + 

“No, you don’t belong to any age,” Andrews said. + 

“Don’t I? I think I belonged to an age then⁠—my own age. I was eighteen and frightened of him, but not with any clear idea of what he wanted. I held him off with tricks, played on his fear with quotations from the Bible, and when one day⁠—or rather one night⁠—he told me with a complete, and I think brutal, candour what he wanted me to do, I told him with equal directness that if he forced me to do it, I should leave him forever. Oh, I had begun to grow up terribly quickly. You see, I traded on his desire for me and by my emphasis on the word ‘force,’ gave him to understand, without another word said, that one day I might come to him voluntarily. And so I held him off, narrowly, always with a sense of danger, till he died.” + 

“Then you won,” Andrews commented with a sigh of relief which he did not trouble to hide. + 

“And what a triumph!” she said sadly not cynically. “He had been good to me, kept me in food and clothing from a child without any idea that one day I should be a woman. And when for the first time he wanted something from me in return more than mere cooking or Bible reading I refused. I showed my disgust and I think that at times it hurt him. And now he is dead, and what would it have mattered if I had given myself to him?” + 

“Then there would have been two Judases in Sussex,” Andrews said with a wry smile. + 

“Would it have been a betrayal?” she thought aloud. “It would have been turned to a good purpose, surely?” + 

Andrews put his head between his hands. “Yes,” he said, in sullen sorrow, “there’s the difference.” + 

She watched him for a moment, puzzled, and then stretched out her hand in vehement protest. “But I didn’t mean that,” she cried; “how could you think it?” She hesitated. “I am your friend,” she said. + 

The face which he raised to her was like that of one dazed and stunned by an unexampled good fortune. “If I could believe that⁠ ⁠…” he murmured in halting, incredulous tones. With a sudden lightening of the spirit he put out his hand to touch her. + 

“Your friend,” she repeated warningly. + 

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I am sorry. My friend,” and he dropped his hand to his side. “I don’t deserve even that.” For the first time his words of self-humiliation were not repeated mockingly by the critic within. “If there was some way I could retrieve⁠ ⁠…” he gave a small, hopeless gesture with his hands. + 

“But is there none?” she asked. “Couldn’t you come forward and deny all that you had written to the officers?” + 

“I can’t unsay a man’s death,” he said. “And if I were able, I don’t believe that I would do it. I can’t go back to that life⁠—the sneers, the racket, that infernal sea, world without end. Even in the middle of this fear and flight, you’ve given me more peace than I’ve known since I left school.” + 

“Well, if you can’t undo what you’ve done, follow it out to the end,” she said. + 

“What do you mean?” + 

“You were driven to the side of the law,” she said. “Stay there. Go into the open and bear witness against the men they’ve caught. You have made yourself an informer, at least you can be an open one.” + 

“But you don’t understand.” He watched her with fascinated, imploring eyes. “The risk.” + 

Elizabeth laughed. “But that’s the very reason. Don’t you see that by all this nameless work of yours, this flight, you’ve made the whole pack of them, that mad boy, better men than you are.” + 

“They were always that,” he murmured sadly under his breath, his head bowed again so that he might not see her firelit enthusiastic eyes. + 

She leant forward excitedly towards him. “Which one of them,” she asked, “if he was an informer would come forward in open court, make himself a marked man and bear the risk?” + 

He shook his head. “No man in his senses would.” He hesitated and added slowly, dwelling on the name with that puzzling mixture of love and hatred, “Except Carlyon.” + 

“Well then,” she said, “go to Lewes, go to the Assizes, bear your witness and you will have shown yourself to have more courage than they.” + 

“But I haven’t,” he said. + 

“You hesitate and hesitate and then you are lost,” she replied. “Can’t you ever shut your eyes and leap?” + 

“No, no,” Andrews said. He got to his feet and moved restlessly about the room. “I can’t. You are trying to drive me and I won’t be driven.” + 

“I’m not driving you. Why should I? Is there nothing in you which would welcome the open?” + 

“You don’t understand,” he cried with a sudden fury. His sentimental melodramatic self, which longed for deep-breasted maternal protection, stood with its back to the wall and uttered the old cry with a sharper despair. For he knew that something in him was answering the appeal, and he was afraid. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” he said. + 

“But think,” she said, her eyes following him in all his movements, “to escape from this⁠ ⁠…” + 

He stopped suddenly and turned directly to her. “This!” he said. “But this is Paradise.” He came a little nearer. “If I was to stop hesitating and leap,” he continued hurriedly, “I could do better than go to Lewes.” + 

“Do better?” she repeated with a slight trace of mockery. + 

“Why do you always repeat words like that?” he said angrily. “It’s maddening. You sit there cool, collected, at peace. Oh I’d hate you if I didn’t love you.” + 

“You are crazy,” she said. + 

He came nearer. “Suppose I take your advice,” he spoke angrily, as though he did indeed hate her, “not to hesitate any longer. I want you. Why shouldn’t I have you?” + 

Elizabeth laughed. “Because you will always hesitate,” she said. “I’ve tried. I give you up.” + 

“That’s why I won’t touch you, is it?” Andrews’s breath rose into a sob, as he felt his last defences crumbling, and over them straddling a new and terrifying future. “You are wrong. I’ll prove you wrong. I’ll go to Lewes.” The word Lewes coming so out of his mouth frightened him. He struck one more hopeless blow against the threatening future. “Mind,” he said, “I promise nothing else. I’ll go to Lewes and see. I don’t promise to go into court.” + 

Elizabeth gave a little sigh of weariness and rose from her chair. “You have a long walk before you tomorrow,” she said. “You must sleep.” She watched him and the faint suspicion in her glance pleased him. He took it as a sign that she was already partly convinced. He grew suddenly proud and confident in his decision and was happier than he had been for many years. “I will sleep where I slept last night,” he said. + 

She went to the window and pulled the curtain across it. “The fog has gone,” she said. “The sky is quite clear and I can see six stars.” She opened the little door beside the fireplace and stood on the bottom step of the small flight of stairs. + 

“Good night.” + 

“Good night.” + 