half obstructed; some one had passed through the aperture, once more the door was shut. The moonlight fell here with a patch of brilliancy, there was obstructed by shadow. The thin and erect form of the Rector passed with the same old walk, the walk which brought hysterical tears and laughter to Mary's eyes and throat, so pregnant was it with memory, - around the curve and out through the other green door. a "See!" said Amy in whisper, touching her arm. "They heard him coming and now they've moved." And she pointed with a little pleased smile to two figures walking decorously a yard apart in the centre of the highroad. The Rector's voice rang out in a ringing salute as he hurried on and into the church. "Is he going there for a service?" Mary asked. Amy shook her head. "No, 'tis practice night. He goes up every now and then to hear the choir sing, but he don't stay long. He'll soon be back." She settled herself more comfortably on the wall. The minutes passed by interminably. The oilman had moved away from the village, and the lights from his cart shone from the turnpike above the blacksmith's shop. The church windows glowed with a pale light, but the lamp above the gateway was not lighted. It was impossible to tell at what moment the Rector's figure emerged from beneath it. After two or three false alarms Mary saw him come slowly back again. He passed through the green door and went back the way he had come. But this time he did not shut the second green door behind him. "Rector must be comin' back again," commented Amy in surprise, and in that hope they waited, Mary holding her breath. A strange sense of expectation possessed her. She told herself that it was absurd; was it unlikely that she who had known Jonathan so well in his youth should misinterpret him in old age? He was going to do something secretive, something about which he felt a strange sense of guiltiness. She knew it by the hump in his shoulders. And, in the meantime, waiting for him, she tried to get Amy to climb down. But the little dwarf's affection was real, and curiosity her ruling passion. "I bain't a-goin' unless you be goin' too," she said. And so together, silent as before, they watched the Rector's return. Then for an instant after he shut the door they lost him. With an acute sense of disappointment Mary thought he had shut the door from the inside, but in another moment she saw him moving like a creeping shadow on the grass. For some reason he did not wish his footsteps heard, but with all her knowledge it was Amy who first arrived at the realisation of his purpose. She spoke harshly under her breath, jumping up and down on the wall in her excitement. "He be goin' to listen!" she said incredulously. And very truly, the Rector had waited silent behind the green door. Amy became almost unmanageable. "They must be there again, and he'll hear what they do say." sadness and gloom, dependence upon the simple courtship of simple people to assuage the aching of his own heart. Did he carry the memory of the "But he'll never tell," said words he heard back to his Mary tranquilly. She wondered, listening to her own voice, that it was not choked by pity. Instantaneously with Amy's ejaculation there had risen to her mind a comprehension of his action, ungentlemanly, dishonourable, indefensible to all except herself-who knew. Amy kept up an excited muttering beneath her breath, watching with intensity the fine head, silver-white in the moonlight, bent in the attitude of a listener on one side of the door. "That," she said scornfully, "is how he always knows so much about it. Never a couple do go to him about having the banns put up but what he can tell 'em a main sight about the courting. He do know what nights they be out on and for how long they do meet, and once he said to John Smalleywhat's his gardener-as how when 'twere raining he'd better bring Meg in and talk to her in the housekeeper's room. Did flabbergast John so much as after that he never went out with Meg no more, because he thought as she'd been telling as how she did go out with him. I do reckon," she added fiercely, "as the Rector be a mean man!" Mary scarcely heard her. She was in a whirl of pity. If Jonathan couldn't marry her, why had he not married someone else and not left himself to quiet study, as she had carried the knowledge of other people's happiness through all these years of separation? Was that why he loved children and young folks, and hated women, to quote Mrs Shore, thinking by hating in the abstract to continue his scorn of her; mysteriously torn from him by irate guardians in her early youth; and by loving children and young people disproving in action what had never been more than theory. Jonathan hating? She watched him creep back across the grass, after the departure of the unobserved lovers, with a tender little smile. Whimsical or austere, he was her Jonathan still. She descended the wall with an intrepidity and imperviousness to bruises which won even Amy's admiration, and walked with her chattering and laughing back to the cottage door, enjoining by her manner secrecy as to her part in the evening's performance, a secrecy with regard to her which Amy loyally kept. But she placed no restriction on herself. case in matters of real importance. Amy the dwarf went from one couple to another with her words of warning, full of a stern indignation against the Rector and of a seething sense of her own importance. She retailed, not without embellishments, her adventure on the wall, and practised the characteristic walk of the Rector so often for their benefit that her own gait began to take on a semblance to it which sent a little stab through Mary's heart, unconscious as she was of the cause. For her the days of that week went by in happiness. The evening on the Rectory wall had not been without its effect upon her health, and she kept to her room in the little cottage in suffering for which the thought of Jonathan's action was a perpetual anodyne. What to any other person of his own class would have been dishonourable and unintelligible, from her found an understanding at once whimsical and tender. Her reasoning, moreover, was correct in this. What Jonathan had desired from his eavesdropping was knowledge of other people's happiness, and through the heavy wood of the green door he could have heard nothing more definite than a low and inarticulate murmur of happy lovers. Looking into her own heart, Mary could gauge accurately his need of this; to a fine nature-not invariably the strongest-the knowledge of the happiness of others is some solace for what in one's own life has been missed. Also, and here lay the core of her content, the shadow, if not the substance, of their early love still remained with Jonathan; if he disliked women, he loved children-he was yet in love with loving. Some of the youthfulness came back to Mary's face with her smile as she remembered that he had once-ah! did he not still?loved her! In the midst of these happy dreamings, these subtle definitions, she became vaguely troubled by the demeanour of Amy the dwarf. The girl seemed to be filled with some secret excitement, and at last she spoke of it. "They doan't stand no more by th' green door," she said. Mary raised her hand involuntarily to her heart. "Why don't they?" "Do'ee think as they 'ould, an' th' Rector listenin' to all their pretty talk?" "But he could not hear what they said through the door, he would only be able to hear their voices," Mary explained, a pink flush on her cheek. Amy looked at her for a moment, aghast that she should champion the Rector after she had herself viewed his indefensible action; then she embodied the lovers' philosophy in a single sentence. "They do like to vancy as they be lonesome like, together!" "I suppose they do," said Mary with a sigh. She sat over the fire for some time, thinking. The aspect of the room-the round table, the glaring oleographs, the hearthrug made of brightly coloured pieces, the uncomfort able couch covered in American hoar-frost covering them-it leather-suddenly became in- allured her by its perfect tolerable. She rose to her feet beauty. Beyond the village with some of the impetuosity the road ran downward steeply of her girlhood, and the sudden to Echo Valley and the woods action tightened her lips in fringing it; the high and overpain. A little furrow appeared hanging peaks of the Mendips, across the smooth whiteness the road winding onward of her forehead, the look of through the pass, edged by calm which had come to be low, scrubby bushes, all shone almost a radiance in her face with a fairy-like and crystalwas dimmed. She crept up- line glory around the gloom stairs and hurried into her of the valley entrance itself. outdoor garments. Mary stood regarding it for a moment, poised as it were upon wonder, then she walked swiftly along the highroad towards the Rectory. As she walked through the village she remembered Amy's prophecy of sunny days in February, and her heart-full of an intangible sorrow borne of her loneliness, her physical weakness, and the stab of pain which had shot through her heart at the thought that Jonathan had lost his pleasure, how sweet and innocent she alone could know - regained some of its wonted serenity; she smiled to herself, realising the symptoms of the cessation of heaviness. "I must be like an indiarubber ball," she said ruefully; "whatever happens I always come up smiling." She smiled whimsically at the phrase she had used, then her eyes widened at the scene before her, and she drew a sudden, short breath of ecstasy. As she talked to herself she had walked onward quickly and reached the brow of the hill where the highroad swept backward past the church and the smithy; and now she stood looking down on the village. It had always pleased her sense of the picturesque; now every roof glittering in the watery gleam of sunshine which shed its radiance upon the rime of What drew her this way she did not know; she was buoyed up by a hopefulness which had somehow entered her heart together with the sight of the beauty of nature. As she walked she made resolutions of sterling simplicity: she would go out every day, however ill she felt; she would not be disheartened over anything-and "anything' was a secret and hushed way of saying "Jonathan." She was smiling to herself again over the realisation of this, when she saw him coming towards her. Afterwards she supposed that she had appeared as selfpossessed as usual as she passed him, returning the courtesy of his raised hat-he knew her as a strange lady staying in his parish with a slight and gracious bow; but how had she done it, she wondered, when her whole being had besought her to make herself known to him. Ought he not, she asked herself passionately, to have recognised her. In the night Mary sat up in bed, a curious lightness at her heart. The misery which had followed her ever since meeting Jonathan left her with inexplicable suddenness. Before her mental vision a picture had arisen, and she gazed at it for a long time before she realised its full meaning. She thought that once more she saw the green door, and she was so placed that she could see on either side of it. Within, his ascetic face and silvery hair lighted by the moon which shone full upon him, Jonathan stood in the attitude of listening, his ear pressed to the panels of the door. On the other side, crushed against the woodwork, another solitary figure waited. For a time Mary could not be sure if it was a woman, or if some village lad had come to this spot to await his sweetheart; the only thing of which she was certain was that there was only one figure on the hither side of the door, and that figure was in shadow. She passed her hand uncertainly across her eyes, wondering if the fault was in them, and with the action she saw more clearly. Why had she not realised it before? Why, of course, the figure was herself! From under the sheltering shadow of the hedge, heedless of wet feet and chattering teeth, Mary watched the lovers of the village walk indifferently along the highroad and past the green door, on into the blissful shadow of the lane in which she stood. The church bells rang loudly, and as on that evening when she had climbed the Rectory wall, the green door swung open and the Rector stepped out and walked briskly, his cassock wrapped around his feet by the playful breeze, to the church. Mary's breath came fluttering from between her lips, she shrank back farther into the hedge, her eyes glued to the little gate through which he would return. Once more questioning filled her mind. Was she too late with this idea? Had Jonathan been to the green door so often in the past ten days that he had grown tired of waiting for the lovers who never came? Or would he creep down, just once again, to listen wistfully for their words of love? She prayed her whole being in the prayer-that he might do so. At least, she would act upon that possibility; as the Rector passed once more through the green door she glided across the road and flattened herself into the wall-space where so many lovers had stood, then, holding her breath, she waited. It was not a particularly dark night for the country, no moon was shining, but a few stars shed a clear reflection of light on to the muddy and glistening road. Mary's eyes had become accustomed to the gloom during her stay under the hedge in the lane, and she scanned the road for sight of any travellers, but none were visible: drawing a deep breath, she leant against the door and began an ardent whispering. |