E had brought his betrothed out to listen to the nightingale, and her young, raucous laugh drowned the early whimper of the bird. He, although no professed poet, but only a farmer, felt that his love was an outrage to the delicate night. Yet how he loved her! And so long as you love, then your heart is tolerant, although your ears protest. As soon as harvest was in and a man found time to breathe and marry-their banns were to be called.

Hannah laughed, crudely and at nothing, as they leaned over the stile, looking down across the sloping pasture-land toward the trilling wood. It was a nervous laugh. The night was full of witchery. All day it had rained, and now a mellow, small moon seemed to totter in the sky. From pools upon the green waste land that stretched between hedgerow and highroad, violet mists arose, and violet, too, was the look of seeded grass growing so thickly. This night of a shrinking moon, of an uncertain nightingale, and of violet vapors, enthralled Lawrence. The tired mists, the sad song, together they fired him.

He listened to Hannah laughing laughing and he tried hard not to shrink. He put that laugh, a positive guffaw, against the delicate contours of her airy body, against the delicious devilry of her narrow, black eyes; against her wide mouth and the arrogant masses of her perfectly black hair. She was a strange-looking girl, handsome, yet only for the exclusive; she was a blossom showing oddly beside others of the village her cousin Jane, for instance, on the father's side. Jane lived with her aunt Paybody at Medmerry Farm, just over there. She was a large, healthylooking girl, with a useful face of uniform buff tint, with pale hair which you could compare, if you chose, to the faint gilding of a winter sky. Her eyes were large and not mysterious, but merely blank. Hannah, who did not love her

cousin, had once said, "Jane's face is like a cheese, with a blue mark for eyes."

Hannah kept senselessly giggling now, and the sound came ill from her fine throat. She seemed to be possessed by some hidden sense of a joke; yet it was a form of humor which made her feel afraid. Lawrence said with passion and roughness at last: "Don't! I can't listen to the bird." He clapped his hand across her mouth. "Your

"Don't!" She cast it away. hand smells."

""Tis only sun"; he was instantly humble. "I've been in the fields all day. I wish it was salt," he said. "Sea's the only thing you can smell and taste and look at and listen to. It fills you. Woods don't; hills don't."

Only food fills you," Hannah told him. Food and clothing she could understand, and found her faith upon.

From the wood came that wonderful fluting-passion in a heartbreak. Lawrence flung his arm round Hannah, and, lest he should hear the laugh again, he killed it first with his lips. There was some curious difference in this embrace which was going to be their last. He felt it and pushed her away. She blinked uneasily at him through the mists. He ignored the nightingale; he peered through warmly colored vapor and startled moonlight into Hannah's narrow eyes. They were a line of fire, mocking him.

"Why don't you go to sea?" she asked, wriggling her shoulders and letting out that discordant mirth again. "Go and be a sailor. Work up and be a captain. You could. Yet why do you think of the sea and talk of it so? You've never been there; this place is a hundred miles away. Now I've been to Blackpool, and it's jolly."

"Work up and be a captain! I wonder if I could."

Hannah, with her woman's wit, had said the thing for him; she had put his

dreamings into word. But he knew that he never would do it, for he was going to marry her and settle on his farm-the farm that his father had left him. There had always been Penfolds at Choller's, just as there had been Paybodys at Medmerry. Yet perfection for Lawrence Penfold would have been to have the chosen woman for his own upon some vast, sweet sea. He dreamed of the sea, talked of it, pondered upon it. He read books about it, and he imagined what it would be like in its many moods. Sometimes, working in his own fields, so many miles inland, and studying the sky, the trees, the many-colored earth, he transImuted all this into restless water.

66

The nightingale's left off," said Hannah, laughing. "Take me home, Larry. It's a wretched summer. We've had a fire most nights. Yes, keep your arm like that at the back of my neck, for it's warm."

She spoke briskly, and she made her foot suit her tongue. She had only a scarf knotted over her head, and Lawrence was looking, as they walked, at her hair. As it fell away on each side of the pure, undeviating parting, it was stormy, black wave upon black wave. He supposed that sometimes waves at sea were black as ink and very cold.

Hannah lived in a lane running out from the main street of the village. It was nothing but a lean arm, with small, new houses dotted irregularly in a double, half-finished row, with the hedges on either side all hacked away. These new houses of cheap bricks and gleaming slates were an outrage upon the burly old inhabitants with their thatched or tiled roofs, and their stout walls which climbed the straggling village. Lawrence hated it all, and reproaching himself, yet not able to help it, he always loved Hannah less in this lane. Her mother, the grocer's widow, had a little income and also what she called some "good furniture." So in the summer she took lodgers, and Hannah waited upon them. Their life was garish; it was cheap and thin. Lawrence, sensitively proud, felt this, and he would be very glad to get his sweetheart away from the ignominy of living in a little new house and of waiting upon strange people. Also he would be glad to get her away from

her mother, who was a town woman with town ideas. Putting it bluntly in his mind, which was downright, for all his salt dreamings, he considered that Hannah's mother was barely respectable. A woman of sixty who wore false hair, false teeth, a hat with flowers, was disjointed with virtue. Her compressed lip and cold glance never mended her of this, and he compared Hannah's mother most unfavorably with his own, who was dead. She had worn a cap indoors and a black bonnet out of doors. Her hair had been brushed thinly over her temples. He would certainly be glad to take Hannah away, and he blamed her mother for that noisy laugh which had silenced the bird.

He was now at Hannah's gate, and he could see, yet mercifully softened by the mist, the outlined, horrid house. His own house, where Penfolds had always lived, was rich with the gracious ideas of men long ago dead who had loved their work and taken time with it. His house had a great, high roof of tiles. You could not dismiss it as just red, or as any one color. There were orange, green, and crimson lights. Houseleek grew

upon this roof in fleshly, gross bunches.

There was an ambitious canopy above Hannah's narrow door. It was of corrugated iron painted that conscious green which shows the pitiful striving of jerrybuilders after something they have heard called Art. Lawrence knew nothing of this; he only knew he hated it—and that was quite enough. It was of painted iron and fluted. To him, poetically speaking, it was, to-night in the mist, as the wings of a bat.

She

"Good night," said Hannah. started laughing again, and she took his arm from round her neck, where it had been while they walked home. She flung it from her as a fine lady flings a fur.

"I'll come in for a bit," said Lawrence, opening the gate; for he was so possessed by her black beauty that he could never bear to leave her; each twenty-four hours, when the night came, he lived afresh this tragedy.

The gate was painted green, with spikes, painted white, along the top. It was a flimsy, grinning thing. Hannah cunningly slipped through herself, then firmly shut it, leaving him upon the

"No, you don't come in," she said, and the June air was pierced by some sudden challenge.

"I'm sorry," she was saying, and her voice was almost sweet; she did not laugh any more. "I've been trying to tell you ever since I came back from Manchester." Twice a year she went to stay with well-to-do cousins, of the manufacturing sort, in Manchester, and she had been back ten days.

"Tell me what?" He seemed to know what she was going to say. They had tricked him, Hannah and her mother. That was it.

"You'll never be a sailor," said Hannah, inconsequently. "They've got blue eyes, and, Larry, yours are brown."

dies. Don't be hard on me, dear. I had to think of mother, you see, and I'm going"-she was backing from the gate with her body, yet she held to the spikes with her fingers, not seeming to realize that Lawrence could have turned the latch at any moment had he chosen"up to Manchester for good on Saturday. Mother's coming, too. We've sold the furniture as it stands."

He felt that all the language of the world was required for his dilemma; yet he could say nothing. He only stared, and, looking up the narrow path that went between the little flower-beds, saw a figure move, phantomwise and watchful, across the front-room window behind the row of plants. This was her mother, who had her eye upon them.

He was thinking that he had loved her, that he loved her now, and always would; yet he had never trusted her; for love has nothing to do with trust. It is a madness. He did not speak; he just waited.

"I'm going to marry somebody else," she said, defiantly. There! That's out."

"That summer lodger! I thought so," returned Lawrence, and sounded distant. "No. It's a man I met at uncle's; a Manchester man, and a very good match. Mother wishes it. I shall be able to help poor mother, you see."

This hypocrisy seemed the last touch. He was broken, and yet he was filled with rage at being made to look a fool in the village; for the wedding day was as good as settled, and he had already, prompted by Hannah and her mother, made various genteel additions to his farm-house for his bride, He wondered what Towse the builder's bill would be for this piece of foolery.

He said nothing. Hannah, watching, thought how handsome and rough he looked; yet nothing but a countryman; and she hugged the dapper idea of her Manchester man.

"You go and get married to Jane," she advised. "She's sick with love for you. She'd give her eyes to be Mrs. Lawrence Penfold. Choller's farm and Medmerry could join. She'll have every

for they were too devilishly clever. The front door opened.

Hannah's mother stood just within the house; a grim woman, yet jaunty; a long, inflexible yellow face, and a lace blouse threaded with mauve ribbons! She made no pretense of any greeting, and he gave her credit for that. In her way she was less of a hypocrite than Hannah.

"Come in, my dear," she said to her daughter. "The night air's damp."

Hannah obeyed at once. She turned and went off without one word. They shut the door, and he was left alone at the gate. He could smell the wet earth as he walked, head hanging, toward Choller's. Yet the smell of the sea would be finer.

Weeks after this he went to Jane. He had known the two cousins nearly all his life; Jane had been for solid comforts and sensible urgings, Hannah for the more filmy requirements of a man. He had never talked of the sea to Jane.

"I've sold the farm," he said; "I'm sailing Monday. It seems a sin for a Penfold not to own Choller's, but I'd rather be a sailor, as you know."

Jane had been expecting this, and she returned, cheerfully, "Come into the parlor and tell me all about it."

She led him through the narrow, long room which they called the kitchen; yet no rough work was done in it, but in the even larger one built at the other side of this carelessly spacious old house.