"And my man! My man!"

They talked a little longer, then parted, where they had parted on a previous great occasion. But they did not part until Maynard had made her promise to meet him again and that quickly.

"You'll be a lot freer now," he said.

"I shall and I shan't too, because all the fighting for foster-father have made me closer than ever to him somehow. There's such a lot of different loves in the world seemingly. I love the dear old man with my whole heart—every bit of it. He can't do nor say nothing I don't love him for—he's an old saint. And I love you with my whole heart too, Lawrence. I properly drown in love when I think of you; and I can almost put my arms round you in my thoughts, and feel we ain't two people at all—only one."

They kissed and went their ways, and he considered all that she had said even to the last word. The thought of these things in themselves rejoiced him. To run away with Dinah and vanish from this environment would not be difficult. Indeed he had already traversed the ground and considered the details of their departure. He would give notice a month before they disappeared, and while his going might be orderly enough, Dinah's must be in the nature of a surprise. He considered whether they should leave in such a manner that their names would not be associated afterwards; but it seemed impossible to avoid that. It mattered little and not at all to her. In any case the details were simple enough; there was nothing whatever to prevent their departure when they chose to depart. To Canada, or Australia, they might go when they willed, and he had retraced the old ground and reconsidered the question of state-aided passages and his own resources, which were ample for the purpose.

But not with these things was Maynard's mind occupied when he left Dinah. He was not a man of very complex character, and the independence of thought that had marked the chief action of his life had never been seriously challenged until now. He had been guided by reason in most questions of conduct and never recognised anything above or outside reason in the action that led him to desert his wife on their wedding day; but that same quality it was that now complicated reason and made him doubt, not for his own sake or well being, not of the future opened for him by the immense new experience of loving Dinah, but by the consequences of such a future for Dinah herself. Here reason spoke with a plain voice. His wits told him that no rational human being could offer any sort of objection to their union; and the tribal superstitions that might intervene, based on the creed morals under which his nation pretended to exist, did not weigh with him. What did was the law of the land, not the religion of the land. Under the law he could not marry Dinah, and no child that might come into the world as a result of their union would be other than a bastard. That would not trouble her; and, indeed, need not trouble anybody, for since Gilbert Courtier, as Dinah had said, no longer existed for them, and was now beyond reach as completely as though indeed he lay in his grave, there could be none to rise and question a marriage entered into between him and Dinah—in Canada, or elsewhere. But there were still the realities and, beyond them, a certain constituent of his own character which now began to assert itself. There persisted in his soul a something not cowardly, but belonging to hereditary instincts of conscience, mother-taught, through centuries. It made Lawrence want to have all in order, conformable to the laws of the world and his own deeply rooted sense of propriety. He had no desire to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds: he knew that for nothing you can only get nothing, but he longed, before all else, that the inevitable might also be the reputable, and that no whisper in time to come should ever be raised against his future wife. The desire rose much above a will to mere safety. It was higher than that and, indeed, belonged to Maynard's ethical values and sense of all that was fitting and good of report among men and women. It echoed the same influence and radical conception of conduct that had made him leave his wife on his wedding day; and the fact that no such considerations controlled Dinah, the truth that she regarded the situation on a plane of more or less material reality and felt no sympathy with his shadowy difficulties, promised to increase them. He hardly saw this himself yet, but though he felt that she was right, yet doubted, in that secret and distinctive compartment of his inner self, whether she might be wrong. He was, for the moment, divided between agreeing with her utterly and feeling that he must allow no natural instinct and rational argument to let him take advantage of her. And when he looked closer into this, a new difficulty arose, for how could he ever make Dinah understand this emotion, or set clearly before her comprehension what he himself as yet so dimly comprehended?

Her grasp of the situation was clear and lucid. From the moment when she had said in the teashop, "D'you call that being married?" he guessed how she was going to feel, and how she would be prepared to act. Nor would the suggested confession to dead Enoch Withycombe have made any difference to Dinah, whatever view the old hunter might have held. Dinah's heart was single, and while now Maynard longed with a great longing to find his own heart seeing eye to eye with hers in every particular, he knew that it did not, and he could not be sure that it ever would. He regarded the situation as lying entirely between her and himself, and entertained no thought of any possibility that others might complicate it, either to retard, or determine the event. She had, indeed, told him of John Bamsey's threats, but to them he attached no importance. From within and not from without must the conclusion be reached.

CHAPTER XXV
JOHN AND JOE

John Bamsey now threatened to run his head into folly. He was an intelligent man; but out of the ferment that had so long obscured his vision and upset his judgment, there had been developed a new thing, and a part of him that chance might have permitted to remain for ever dormant, inert and harmless, was now thrust uppermost. He developed a certain ferocity and a sullen and obstinate passion bred from sense of wrong, not only towards Dinah, but the unknown, who had supplanted him with her. For that he had been supplanted, despite her assurance to the contrary, John swore to himself. Thus, indeed, only could Dinah's defection be explained; and only so could he justify his purpose and determination to treat this interloper evilly and rob him, at any cost, of his triumph. He built up justification for himself, therefore, and assured himself that he was right, as a man of character, in taking revenge upon his unknown enemy. He convinced himself easily enough and only hesitated farther because his rival continued to be a shadow, to whom his sister alone was prepared to put a name. She resolutely swore that Maynard was the man, and she declared that her father had mentioned him and Dinah together, more than once, when rambling in his fever dreams.