CHAPTERPAGE
[I]The Borough[1]
[II]Dyke House[24]
[III]Sea-drift[40]
[IV]Oakguard[49]
[V]A Symposium[58]
[VI]Bridge-Head and Withy-Bed[73]
[VII]Vespers[87]
[VIII]Sun and Sea[102]
[IX]Priest and Doctor[118]
[X]Low Tide[129]
[XI]The Sisters[139]
[XII]Hamish Traherne[152]
[XIII]Departure[160]
[XIV]Brand Renshaw[175]
[XV]Broken Voices[194]
[XVI]The Fens[212]
[XVII]The Dawn[226]
[XVIII]Bank-Holiday[239]
[XIX]Listeners[264]
[XX]Ravelston Grange[282]
[XXI]The Windmill[311]
[XXII]The Northwest Wind[337]
[XXIII]Warden of the Fishes[352]
[XXIV]The Twenty-eighth of October[375]
[XXV]Baltazar Stork[409]
[XXVI]November Mist[430]
[XXVII]Threnos[447]

RODMOOR

I
THE BOROUGH

It was not that he concealed anything from her. He told her quite frankly, in that first real conversation they had together—on the little secluded bench in the South London park—about all the morbid sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse.

He even indicated to her—while the sound of grass-mowing came to them over the rain-wet tulips—some of the most secret causes of this event; his savage reaction, for instance, against the circle he was thrown into there; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection; his aching nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw.

He explained how his mental illness had taken so dangerous, so unlooked for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long incarceration.

No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might,—and in a certain sense he said too much rather than too little—she did not really understand him.

Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led her to say what was most reassuring to him, and most consolatory; but in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover’s confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick’s horizon during these memorable weeks—weeks that, after all, she was destined to look back upon as so strangely happy.