"Hasn't got a soul. . . ."

"Well, what is the soul, anyway?"

There you are-the thing's properly started, and the more the set drinks the vaguer it gets until finally it goes happily to bed and wakes with a headache and a healthy opinion that "Religion and that sort of stuff is rot" in the morning. That is precisely as far as intellect ever ventured in Saul's. There may have been quaint obscure fellows who sported their oaks every night and talked cleverly on ginger-beer, but they were not admitted as part of the scheme of things. . . . Saulines, to quote Lawrence, "are not clever."

They were not especially clever to-night, thought Olva, as he sat in the shadow away from the light of the fire and watched them sitting back in enormous armchairs, with their legs stretched out, blowing wreaths of smoke into the air, drinking whiskies and sodas . . . no, not clever.

Craven, the shadows blacker than ever under his eyes, was on the opposite side of the room from Olva. He sat with his head down and was silent.

"Think of a rabbit now," said Williamson.

"I suppose," said Galleon, who was not gifted, "that they're happy enough."

"Yes, but what do they make of it all?"

At this moment Craven suddenly burst in with "Where's Carfax?"

This question was felt by every one to be tactless. Elaborately, with great care and some considerable effort, Carfax had been forgotten—forgotten, it seemed, by every one save Craven. He had been forgotten because his death did not belong to the Cambridge order of things, because it raised unpleasant ideas, and made one morbid and neurotic. It had, in fact, nothing in common with cold baths, marmalade, rugby football, and musical comedy.

On the present occasion the remark was especially unpleasant because Craven had made it in so odd a manner. During the last few weeks it had been very generally noticed that Craven had not been himself—so pleasant and healthy a fellow he had always been, but now this Carfax business was too much for him. "Look out for young Craven" had been the general warning, implied if not expressed. Persons who threatened to be unusual were always marked down in Cambridge.

And now Craven had been unusual—"Where's Carfax?" . . . What a dreadful thing to say and how tactless! The note, moreover, in Craven's voice sounded a danger. There was something in the air as though the fellow might, at any moment, burst into tears, fire a pistol into the air, or jump out of the window! So unpleasant, and Carfax was much more real, even now, than an abstract rabbit.

"Dear boy," said Cardillac, easily, "Carfax is dead. We all miss him—it was a beastly, horrible affair, but there's no point in dwelling on things; one only gets morbid, and morbidity isn't what we're here for."

"It's all very well," Craven was angrily muttering, "but it's scandalous the way you forget a man. Here he was, amongst the whole lot of you, only a month or so ago and he was a friend of every one's. And then some brute kills him—he's done for—and you don't care a damn . . . it's beastly—it makes one sick."

"Where do you think he is, Craven?" Olva asked quietly from his shadowy corner.

Craven flung up his head. "Perhaps you can tell us," he cried. There was such hostility in his voice that the whole room was startled. Poor Craven! He really was very unwell. The sight of his tired eyes and white cheeks, the shadow of his hand quivering on his knee—here were signs that all was not as it should be. Gone, now, at any rate, any possibility of a comfortable evening. Craven said no more but still sat there with his head banging, his only movement the shaking of his hand.

Cardillac tried to bring ease back again, Williamson once more started his rabbits, but now there was danger in that direction. Conversation fell, heavily, helplessly, to the ground. Some man got up to go and some one else followed him. It was the wrong moment for departure for they had drunk enough to make it desirable to drink more, but to escape from that white face of Craven's was the thing—out into the air.

At last Craven himself got up. "I must be off," he said heavily.

"So must I," Olva said, coming forward from his corner. Craven flung him a frightened glance and then passed stumbling out of the door.

Olva caught him up at the bottom of the dark stairs. He put a hand on Craven's trembling arm and held him there.

"I want to talk to you, Craven. Come up to my room."

Craven tried to wrench his arm away. "No, I'm tired. I want to go to bed."

"You haven't been near me for weeks. Why?"

"Oh, nothing—let me go. I'll come up another time."

"No, I must talk to you—now. Come." Olva's voice was stern—his face white and hard.

"No—I won't."

"You must. I won't keep you long. I have something to tell you."

Craven suddenly ceased to struggle. He gazed straight into Olva's eyes, and the look that he gave him was the strangest thing—something of terror, something of anger, a great wonder, and even—strangest of all!—a struggling affection.

"I'll come," he said.

In Olva's room he stood, a disturbed figure facing the imperturbability of the other man with restless eyes and hands that moved up and down against his coat. Olva commanded the situation, with stern eyes he seemed to be the accuser. . . .

"Sit down—fill a pipe."

"No, I won't sit—what do you want?"

"Please sit. It's so much easier for us both to talk. I can't say the things that I want to when you're standing over me. Please sit down."

Craven sat down.

Olva faced him. "Now look here, Craven, a little time ago you came and wished that we should see a good deal of one another. You came in here often and you took me to see your people. You were charming . . . I was delighted to be with you."

Olva paused—Craven said nothing.

"Then suddenly, for no reason that I can understand, this changed. Do you remember that afternoon when you had tea with me here and I went to sleep? It was after that—you were never the same after that. And it has been growing worse. Now you avoid me altogether—you don't speak to me if you can help it. I'm not a man of many friends and I don't wish to lose one without knowing first what it is that I have done. Will you tell me what it is?"

Craven made no answer. His eyes passed restlessly up and down the room as though searching for some way of escape. He made little choking noises in his throat. When Olva had had no answer to his question, he went gravely on—

"But it isn't only your attitude to me that matters, although I do want you to explain that. But I want you also to tell me what the damage is. You're most awfully unwell. You're an utterly different man—changed entirely during the last week or two, and we've all noticed it. But it doesn't only worry us here; it worries your mother and sister too. You've no right to keep it to yourself."

"There's nothing the matter."

"Of course there is. A man doesn't alter in a day for nothing, and I date it all from that evening when you had tea with me, and I can't help feeling that it's something that I can clear up. If it is anything that I can do, if I can clear your bother up in any way, you have only to tell me. And," he added slowly, "I think at least that you owe me an explanation of your own personal avoidance of me. No man has any right to drop a friend without giving his reasons. You know that, Craven."

Craven suddenly raised his weary eyes. "I never was a friend of yours. We were acquaintances—that's all."

"You made me a friend of your mother and sister. I demand an explanation, Craven."

"There is no explanation. I'm not well—out of condition."

"Why?"

"Why is a fellow ever out of condition? I've been working too hard, I suppose. . . . But you said you'd got something to tell me. What have you got to tell me?"

"Tell me first what is troubling you."

"No."

"You refuse?"

"Absolutely."

"Then I have nothing to tell you."

"Then you brought me in here on a lie. I should never have come if—-"

"Yes?"

"If I hadn't thought you had something to tell me."

"What should I have to tell you?"

"I don't know . . . nothing."

There was a pause, and then with a sudden surprising force, Craven almost appealed—

"Dune, you can help me. You can make a great difference. I am ill; it's quite true. I'm not myself a bit and I'm tortured by imaginations—awful things. I suppose Carfax has got on my nerves and I've had absurd fancies. You can help me if you'll just answer me one question—only one. I don't want to know anything else, I'll never ask you anything else—only this. Where were you on the afternoon that Carfax was murdered?"

He brought it out at last, his hands gripping the sides of his chair, all the agonized uncertainty of the last few weeks in his voice. Olva faced him, standing above him, and looking down upon him.

"My dear Craven—what an odd question—why do you want to know?"

"Well, finding your matchbox like that—there in Sannet Wood—and I know you must have lost it just about then because I remember your looking for it here. I thought that perhaps you might have seen somebody, had some kind of suspicion. . . ."

"Well, I was, as a matter of fact, there that very afternoon. I walked through the wood with Bunker—rather late. I met no one during the whole of the time."

"No one?"

"No one."

"You have no suspicion?"

"No suspicion."

The boy relapsed from his eagerness into his heavy dreary indifference. His lips were working. Olva seemed to catch the words—"Why should it be I? Why should it be I?" Olva came over to him and placed his hand on his shoulder.

"Look here, old man, I don't know what's the matter with you, but it's plain enough that you've got this Carfax business on your nerves—drop it. It does no good—it's the worst thing in the world to brood about. Carfax is dead—if I could help you to find his murderer I would—but I can't."

Craven's whole body was trembling under Olva's hand. Olva moved back to his chair.

"Craven, listen to me. You must listen to me." Then, speaking very slowly he brought out-"I have a right to speak to you—a great right. I wish to marry your sister."

Craven started up from his chair.

"No, no," he cried. "You! Never, so long as I can prevent it."

"You have no right to say that," Olva answered him sternly, "until you have given me your reasons. I don't know that she cares a pin about me—I don't suppose that she does. But she will. I'm going to do my very best to marry her."

Craven broke away to the middle of the room. His body was shaking with passion and he flung out his hand as though to ward off Olva from him.

"You to marry my sister! My God, I will prevent it—I will tell her—" He caught himself up suddenly.

"What will you tell her?"

Then Craven collapsed. He stood there, rocking on his feet, his hands covering his face.

"It's all too awful," he moaned. "It's all too awful."

For a wonderful moment Olva felt that he was about to tell Craven everything. A flood of words rose to his lips—he seemed, for an instant, to be rising with a great joyous freedom, as did Christian when he had dropped his burden, to a new honesty, a high deliverance.

Then he remembered Margaret Craven.

"You take my advice, Craven, and get your nerves straight. They're in a shocking condition."

Craven went to the door and turned.

"You can tell nothing?"

"Nothing."

"I will never rest until I know who murdered Carfax."

He closed the door behind him and was gone.



CHAPTER XI

FIFTH OF NOVEMBER

1

That attempt to make Craven speak his mind was Olva's last plunge into the open. He saw now, with a clarity that was like the sudden lifting of some blind before a lighted window, that he had been beguiled, betrayed. He had thought that his confession to Bunning would stay the pursuit. He saw now that it was the Pursuer Himself who had instigated it. With that confession the grey shadow had drawn nearer, had made one degree more certain the ultimate capitulation.

For Bunning was surely the last person to be told—with every hour that became clearer. There were now about four weeks before the end of term. The Dublin match was to be on the first Tuesday of December, two days before every one went down, and between the two dates—this 5th of November and that 2nd of December—the position must be held. . . .

The terror of the irresistible impulse now never left Olva. He had told Bunning in a moment of uncontrol—what might he not do now at any time? At one instant to be absolutely silent seemed the only resource, at the next to rush out and take part in all the life about him. Were he silent he was tortured by the silence, if he flung himself amongst his fellow men every hour threatened self-betrayal.

What, moreover, was happening in the house in Rocket Road? Craven was only waiting for certainty and at any moment some chance might give him what he needed. What did Mrs. Craven know?

Margaret . . . Margaret . . . Margaret—-Olva took the thought of her in his hand and held it like a sword, against the forces that were crowding in upon him.

The afternoon of November 5 was thick with fog so that the shops were lighted early and every room was dim and unreal, and a sulphurous smell weighted the air. After "Hall" Olva came back to his room and found Bunning, his white face peering out of the foggy mist like a dull moon from clouds, waiting for him. All day there had hung about Olva heavy depression. It had seemed so ugly and sinister a world—the fog had been crowded with faces and terror, and the dreadful overpowering impression of unreality that had been increasing with every day now took from his companions all life and made of them grinning masks. He remembered Margaret's cry, "It is like walking in a dream," and echoed it. Surely it was a dream! He would wake one happy morning and find that he had invited Craven and Carfax to breakfast, and he would hear them, whilst he dressed, talking together in the outer room, and, later, he would pass Bunning in the Court without knowing him. He would be introduced one day to Margaret Craven and find the house in which she lived a charming comfortable place, full of light and air, with a croquet lawn at the back of it, and Mrs. Craven, a nice ordinary middle-aged woman, stout possibly and fond of gossip. And instead of being President of the Wolves and a person of importance in the College he would be once again his old self, knowing nobody, scornful of the whole world and of the next world as well. And this brought him up with a terrible awakening. No, that old reality could never be real again, for that old reality meant a world without God. God had come and had turned the world into a nightmare . . . or was it only his rebellion against God that had so made it? But the nightmare was there, the awful uncertainty of every word, of every step, because with the slightest movement he might provoke the shadow to new action, if anything so grave, so stern, so silent as that Pursuit could be termed action, and . . . it was odd how certainly he knew it . . . so kind. Bunning's face brought him to the sudden necessity of treating the nightmare as reality, for the moment at any rate. The staring spectacles piteously appealed to him—

"I can't stand it—I can't stand it."

"Hush!" Olva held his hand, and out of the fog, below in the Court, a voice was calling—"Craven! Craven! Buck up, you old ass!"

"They're going to light bonfires and things," Bunning quavered, and then, with a hand that had always before seemed soft and flabby but that was now hard and burning, he caught Olva's wrist. "I had to see you—I've been three days now—waiting—all the time for them to come and arrest you. Oh! I've imagined everything—everything—and the fog makes it worse. . . . Oh! my God! I can't stand it."

The man was on the edge of hysteria. His senseless giggle threatened that in another instant it would be beyond all control. There was no time to be lost. Olva took him by the shoulders, held him firmly and looked straight into the weak, quivering eyes that were behind the glasses like fish in a tank.

"Look here, Bunning. Pull yourself together. You must—you must. Do you understand? If you've never done it before you must do it now. Remember that you wanted to help me. Well, now you can do it—but remember that if you give way so that people notice you, then the show's up. They'll be asking questions—they'll watch you—and you'll have done for me. Otherwise there's no risk whatever—no risk whatever. Just remember that—it's as though I'd never done anything; everything's going on in its usual way; life will always be just the same . . . if you'll keep hold of yourself—do you understand? Do you hear me?"

Bunning's quavering voice answered him, "I'll try."

"Well, look here. Think of it quite calmly, naturally. You're taking it like a story that you'd read in a magazine or a play you'd seen at a theatre—melodrama with all the lights on and every one screaming. Well, it can be like that if you want it. Every one thinks of murder that way and you can go shrieking to the Dean and have the rope round my neck in a minute. But I want you to think of it as the most ordinary thing in the world. Remember no one knows but yourself, and they won't know either if you behave in a natural sort of way." Then suddenly his voice sank to a growl and he caught the man's hands in his and held the whole quivering body in his control—"Quiet!" he muttered, "Quiet!"

Bunning had begun to laugh—quite helplessly, almost noiselessly—only his fat cheeks were quivering and his mouth foolishly, weakly smiling: his eyes seemed to be disconnected from his body and to be protesting against it. They looked out like a prisoner from behind barred windows. The body began to shake from head to foot-ripples of noiseless laughter shook his fat limbs, then suddenly he began . . . peal upon peal. . . the tears came rolling down, the mouth was loosely trembling, and still only the eyes, in a kind of sad, stupid wonder, protested.

Olva seized his throat-"Stop it, you damned fool!" . . . He looked straight into the eyes—Bunning ceased as suddenly as he had begun. The horrible, helpless noise fell with a giggle into silence; he collapsed into a chair and hid his face in his hands.

There was a long pause. Olva gazed at the bending figure, summoning all his will power to hold the shaking thing in control. He waited. Then, softly, he began again. "Bunning, I did you a great wrong when I told you—you're not up to it."

From behind the hands there came a muffled voice—"I am up to it."

"This sort of thing makes it impossible."

"It shall never happen again." Bunning lifted his tear-stained face. "It's been coming for days. I've been so dreadfully frightened. But now—that I've been with you—it's better, much better. If only—" and his voice caught—"if only—no one suspects."

Olva gravely answered, "No one suspects."

"If I thought that any one—that there was any chance—that any one had an idea. . . ."

Craven's voice was echoing in Olva's ears. He answered again—

"No one has the slightest suspicion."

Bunning got up heavily from the chair—"I shall be better now. It's been so awful having a secret. I never could keep one. I always used to do wrong things at home and then tell them and then get punished. But I will try. But if I thought that they guessed—" There was a rap on the door and Bunning gasped, stepped back against the wall, his face white, his knees trembling.

"Don't be such a fool," Olva said fiercely. "If you're like that every time any one knocks you may as well chuck it at once. Look sensible, man. Pull yourself together."

Lawrence entered, bringing log with him from the stairs. His big, thick-set body was so reassuring, so healthy in its sturdiness, so strange a contrast to the trembling figure against the wall that Olva felt an immense relief.

"You know Bunning, Lawrence?"

"How do?"

Lawrence gripped Bunning's fingers, nodded to Bunning's stumbling words and smiled genially.

Bunning got to the door, blinked upon them both from behind his glasses and was gone—muttering something about "work . . . letters to write."

"Rum feller," said Lawrence, and dismissed him with a chuckle. "Shouldn't ever have thought him your style, Dune . . . but you're a clever feller and clever fellers always see more in stupid fellers than ordinary fellers do . . . come out and see the rag."

"Rag! What rag?"

"It's November 5th."

So it was. In the air already perhaps there were those mysterious signs and portents that heralded riot—nothing, as yet, for the casual observer to notice, nothing but a few undergraduates arm-in-arm pacing the sleepy streets—a policeman here, a policeman there. Every now and again clocks strike the quarters, and in many common-rooms heads are nodding over ancient Port and argument of the gentlest kind is being tossed to and fro. But, nevertheless, we remember other Fifths of November. There was that occasion in '98, that other more distant time in '93. . . . There was that furious battle in the Market Place when the Town Hall was nearly set on fire and a policeman had his arm broken.

These are historic occasions; on the other hand the fateful date has passed, often enough, without the merest flinging of a squib or friendly appropriation of the genial policeman's helmet.

No one can say, no one knows, whether there will be riot to-night or no. Most of the young gentlemen now parading the K.P. and Petty Cury would undoubtedly prefer that there should be a riot. For one thing there has been no riot during the last five or six years—no one "up" just now has had any experience of such a thing, and it would be beyond question delightful to taste the excitement of it. But, on the other hand, there is all the difficulty of getting under way. One cannot possibly enjoy the occasion until one has reached that delightful point when one has lost all sense of risk, when recklessly we pile the bonfire, snap our fingers in the nose of poor Mr. Gregg who is terrific enough when he marches solemnly into Chapel but is nothing at all when he is screaming with shrill anger amongst the lights and fury of the blazing common.

Will this wonderful moment when discipline, respect for authority, thoughts of home, terrors of being sent down, all these bogies, are flung derisively to the winds arrive to-night? It has struck nine, and to Olva and Lawrence, walking solemnly through the market-place, it all seems quiet enough.

But behold how the gods work their will! It so happens that Giles of St Martin's has occasion, on this very day, to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. It has been done as a twenty-first birthday should be done, and by nine o'clock the company, twenty in number, have decided that "it was the ruddiest of ruddy old worlds"—that—"let's have some moretodrink ol' man—it was Fifth o' November—and that a ruddyoldbonfire would be—a—ruddyol'-joke—-"

Now, at half-past nine, the company of twenty march singing down the K.P. and gather unto themselves others—a murmur is spreading through the byways. "Bonfire on the Common." "Bonfire on the Common." The streets begin to be black with undergraduates.

2

Olva was conscious as he passed with Lawrence through the now crowded streets that Bunning's hysteria had had an effect upon his nerves. He could not define it more directly than by saying that the Shadow that had, during these many weeks, appeared to be pursuing him, at a distance, now seemed to be actually with him. It was as though three of them, and not two, were walking there side by side. It was as though he were himself whispering in his own ear some advice of urgent pleading that he was himself rejecting . . . he was even weighted with the sense of some enlarged growth, of having in fact to carry more, physically as well as spiritually, than he had ever carried before. Now it quite definitely and audibly pleaded—

"Submit—submit—submit. . . . See the tangle that you are getting yourself into. See the trouble that you are getting others into. See the tangle and muddle that you are making of it all. . . . Submit. . . . Give in. . . . You're beaten."

But he was not beaten. Neither the love of Margaret, nor the suspicions of Rupert, nor the hysteria of Bunning had as yet defeated him . . . and even as he resisted it was as though he were fighting himself.

Sidney Street was now quite black with thronging undergraduates moving towards the Common. There was very little noise in it all; every now and again some voice would call aloud to some other voice and would be answered back; a murmur like the swelling of some stream, unlike, in its uniformity and curious evenness of note, any human conversation, seemed to cling to the old grey walls. All of it at present orderly enough but with sinister omen in its very quiet.

Olva felt an increasing excitement as he moved. It was an excitement that had some basis in the stir that was about him, in the murmur like bees of the crowd, in the soft stirring of grey branches above the walls of the street against the night sky, in the golden lights that, set in dim towers, shone high up above their heads. In all these things there was a mysterious tremor that beat, with the rhythm of a pulse, from the town's very heart—but there was more than that in his excitement. There was working in him a conviction that he was now, even now, reaching the very climax of his adventure. Very certainly, very surely, the moment was thawing near, and even in the instant when he had, that very evening, left his rooms, he had stepped, he instinctively knew, out of one stage into another.

"Where are we going?" he asked Lawrence.

"Common. There's goin' to be an old fire. Hope there's a row—don't mind who I hit."

The side streets that led to the Common made progress more difficult, and, with the increased difficulty, came also a more riotous spirit. Some one started "The Two Obadiahs," and it was lustily sung with a good deal of repetition; several people had wooden rattles, intended to encourage College boats during the races, but very useful just now. There were, at the point where the street plunges into the Common, some wooden turnstiles, and these of course were immensely in the way and men were flung about and there was a good deal of coarse pleasantry, and one mild freshman, who had been caught into the crowd by accident, was thrown on to the ground and very nearly trodden to death.

The sight of the vast and mysterious Common put every one into the best of spirits. There was room here to do anything, and it was also dark enough and wide enough to escape if escape were advisable. Moreover the space of it seemed so limitless that it negatived any one's responsibility. A sudden delightful activity swept over the world, and it was immediately every one's business to get wood from anywhere at all and drag it into the middle of the Common. As they moved through the turnstiles Olva fancied that he caught sight of Craven.

On the Common's edge, with bright little lights in their windows, were perched a number of tiny houses with strips of garden in front of them. These little eyes watched, apprehensively no doubt, the shadowy mass that hovered under the night sky. They did not like this kind of thing, these little houses—they remembered five or six years ago when their cabbages had been trampled upon, their palings torn down, even hand-to-hand contests in the passages and one roof on fire. Where were the police? The little eyes watched anxiously. There was no sign of the police. . . .

Olva smiled at himself for the excitement that he was feeling. He was standing at present with Lawrence on the edge of the Common, watching, but he was feeling irresistibly drawn towards the dark pile of wood that was rising slowly towards the sky.

"As though one were ten years old"—and yet there was Lawrence murmuring, "I'd awfully like to hit somebody." And that, after all, was what it all came to. Perhaps Olva, if there were really to be some "scraps," would be able to work off some of his apprehension, of his breathlessness. Oh! for one wild ten minutes when scruples were flung to the winds, when there was at last in front of one an enemy whom one could touch, whom one could fling, physically, brutally, down before one!

"The worst of it is," Lawrence was saying, "there are these town cads—they'll be in the back somewhere shoutin' ''It 'im, 'Varsity,' or somethin' and then runnin' for their lives if they see a Robert comin' . . . it's rotten bein', mixed up with such muck . . . anyhow I'm goin' to have a dash at it——" and he had suddenly plunged forward into space.

Olva was alone. A breeze blew across the Common, the stars twinkled and jumped as though they were suffering from a nervous attack, and with every moment restraint was flung a farther distance, more voices called aloud and shouted, more men poured out of the little side streets. It had the elements of a great mystery. It was as though Mother Earth had, with a heave of her breast, tossed these shadowy forms into the air and was herself stirring with the emotion of their movement.

There was an instant's breathless silence; to the roar of a shouting multitude a bright hard flame shot like steel into the air—the bonfire was alight.

Now with every moment it mounted higher. Black pigmy figures were now dancing round it and across the Common other figures were always passing, dragging wood with them. The row of palings towards the river had gone and soon those little cottages that lined the grass must suffer. Surely now the whole of the University was gathered there! The crowd was close now, dense—men shoved past one another crying out excited cries, waving their arms with strange meaningless gestures. They were arriving rapidly at that condition when they had neither names nor addresses but merely impulses.

Most dangerous element of all threatened that ring of loafers on the outskirts—loafers from the town. Here in this "mob of excited boys" was opportunity for them of getting something back on that authority that had so often treated them with ignominy. . . . Their duty to shout approval, to insult at a distance, to run for their lives were their dirty bodies in any danger . . . but always to fan the flame—-"Good old—Varsity—Let them have it, the dirty—" "Pull their shirts off—"

Screams, laughter, shouting, wild dancing—let the Dons come now and see what they can make of it!

"Bulldogs!" sounded a voice in Olva's ear, and turning round he beheld a breathless, dishevelled Bunning. "I've been pulling wood off the palings. Ha! hoch! he! (such noises to recover his breath). Such a rag!"—and then more apprehensively, "Bulldogs! There they are, with Metcher!" They stood, two big men in top-hats, plainly to be seen behind a Don in cap and gown, upon a little hill to the right of the bonfire. The flames lit their figures. Metcher, the Don, was reading something from a paper, and, round the hill, derisively dancing, were many undergraduates. Apparently the Proctor found the situation too difficult for him and presently he disappeared. Bunning watched him, apprehension and a sense of order struggling' with a desire for adventure. "They've gone to fetch the police. There'll be an awful row."

There probably would be because that moment had at last been reached when authority was flung absolutely to the winds of heaven. The world seemed, in a moment, to have gone mad. Take Bunning, his cheeks flushed, his body shaking, his eyes flaming, for an example. Olva, dark, motionless in his shadow, watched it all and waited for his moment. He knew that it was coming. Grimly he addressed the Shadow, now close to his very heart. "I know you. You are urging me on. This night is your business. . . . But I am fighting you still! I am fighting you still!"

The moment came. Bunning, clutching on to Olva's sleeve, whispered, "The police! Even at that crisis of intensest excitement he could be seen, nervously, pushing his spectacles up his nose. A surging crowd of men, and Olva again fancied that he caught sight of Craven, swept towards the row of timid twinkling lights with their neat little gardens like trembling protests laid out before them. More wood! more wood! to appease that great flaming monster that shot tongues of fire now to the very heavens. More wood! more wood!"

"Look out, the police!"

They came, with their truncheons, in a line down the Common. Olva was flung into the heart of a heaving mass of legs and arms. He caught a glimpse of Bunning behind and he thought that he saw Craven a little to his right. He did not know—he did not care. His blood was up at last. He was shouting he knew not what, he was hitting out with his fists. Men's voices about him—"Let go, you beast." "My God, I'll finish you." "There goes a bobby." "Stamp on him!"

A disgraceful scene. The policemen were hopelessly outnumbered. The crowd broke on to the line of orderly little gardens, water was poured from windows, the palings were flung to the ground—glass broken—screams of women somewhere in the distance.

But even now Olva knew that his moment had not come. Then some one shouted in his ear—"Town cads! They're murdering a bobby!" He was caught with several other men (of their number was Bunning) off the Common up a side street.

A blazing lamp showed him an angry, shouting, jeering crowd; figures closed round something on the ground. Four men had joined arms with him, and now the five of them, shouting "'Varsity!" hitting right and left, rushed into the circle. The circle broke and Olva saw lying his length on the ground, half-stunned, clothed only in a torn shirt of bright blue, a stout heavy figure—once obviously, from the clothes flung to one side, a policeman, now with his large red face in a muddy puddle, his fat naked legs bent beneath him, his fingers clutching dirt, nothing very human at all. Town cads of the worst! Some brute now was raising his foot and kicking the bare flesh!

Instantly the world was on flame for Olva. Now again, as once in Sannet Wood, he must hit and hit with all his soul. He broke, like a madman, into the heart of the crowd, sending it flying. There were cries and screams.

He was conscious of three faces. There was Bunning there, white, staring. There was Craven, with his back to a house-door, staring also—and directly before him was a purple face with muddy hair fringing it and little beady eyes. The face of the brute who had been kicking! He must hit. He struck and his fist broke the flesh! He was exultant . . . at last he had, after these weeks of intangibility, found something solid. The face broke away from him. The circle scattered back and the fat, naked body was lying in the mud alone. There was a sudden silence. Olva, conscious of a great power surging through his body, raised his hand again.

A voice, shrill, terror in it, screamed, "Look out, man, he'll kill you!"

He turned and saw under the lamplight Craven, his eyes blazing, his finger pointed. He was suddenly cold from head to foot. The voice came, it had seemed, from heaven. Craven's eyes were alive now with certainty. Then there was another cry from somewhere of "The police!" and the crowd had melted. In the little street now there were only the body of the policeman and a handful of undergraduates.

They raised the man, poured water over him, found some of his clothes, and two men led him, his head lolling, down the street.

There was a noisy world somewhere in the distance, but here there was silence. Olva crept slowly out of his exultation and found himself in the cold windy street with Bunning for his only companion.

Bunning—now a torn, dirty, bleeding Bunning—gripped his arm.

"Did you hear?"

"Hear what?"

"Craven—when you were fighting there—Craven was watching . . . I saw it all . . . Craven suspects."

Olva met the frightened eyes—"He does not suspect."

"Didn't you hear? He called out to the cad you were going for. . . ." Then, in a kind of whimper, dismal enough in the dreary little street—"He'll find out—Craven—I know he will. . . . Oh! my God! what shall I do!"

Some one had broken the glass of the street lamp and the gas flared above them, noisily.



CHAPTER XII

LOVE TO THE "VALSE TRISTE"

1

It was all, when one looked back upon it, the rankest melodrama. The darkness, the flaming lamp, Craven's voice and eyes, Bunning . . . it had all arranged itself as though it bad been worked by a master dramatist. At any rate there they now were, the three of them—Olva, Bunning, Craven—placed in a situation that could not possibly stay as it was. In which direction was it going to develop? Bunning had no control at all, it would be he who would supply the next move . . . meanwhile in the back of Olva's mind there was that banging sense of urgency, no time to be lost. He must see Margaret and speak before Rupert spoke to her. Perhaps, even now, Craven was not certain. If he only knew of how much Craven was sure! Did he feel sure enough to speak to Margaret?

Meanwhile the first and most obvious thing was that Bunning was in a state of terror that threatened instant exposure. The man was evidently realizing that now, for the first time, he had a big thing with which he must grapple. He must grapple with his devotion to Olva, with his terror of Craven, but, most of all, with his terror of himself. That last was obviously the thing that tortured him, for, having now been given by the High Gods an opportunity of great service, so miserable a creature did he consider himself that he would not for an instant trust his control. He was trying, Olva saw, with an effort that in its intensity was pathetic to prove himself worthy of the chance that had been offered him, as though it were the one sole opportunity that he would ever be given, but to appear to the world something that he was not was an art that Bunning and his kind could never acquire—that is their tragedy. It was the fate of Bunning that his boots and spectacles should always negative any attempt that he might make at a striking personality.

On the night after the "Rag" he sat in Olva's room and made a supreme effort at control.

"If you can only hold on," Olva told him, "to the end of term. It's only a week or two now. Just stick it until then; you won't be bothered with me after that."

"You're going away?"

"I don't know—it depends."

"I don't know what I should do if you went. To have to stand that awful secret all alone . . . only me knowing. Oh! I couldn't! I couldn't! and now that Craven—"

"Craven knows nothing. He doesn't even suspect anything. See here, Bunning"—Olva crossed over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. "Can't you understand that your behaviour makes me wish that I hadn't told you, whereas if you care as you say you do you ought to want to show me how you can carry it, to prove to me that I was right to tell you—-"

"Yes, I know. But Craven—-"

"Craven knows nothing."

"But he does." Bunning's voice became shrill and his fat hand shook on Olva's arm. "There's something I haven't told you. This morning in Outer Court he stopped me."

"Craven stopped you?"

"Yes. There was no one about. I was going along to my rooms and he met me and he said: 'Hullo, Bunning.'"

"Well?"

"I'd been thinking of it—of his knowing, I mean—all night, so I was dreadfully startled, dreadfully startled. I'm afraid I showed it."

"Get on. What did he say?"

"He said: 'Hullo, Bunning!'"

"Yes, you've told me that. What else?"

"I said 'Hullo!' I was dreadfully startled. I don't think he'd ever spoken to me before. And then he looked so strange—wild, as though he hadn't slept, and white, and his eyes moved all the time. I'm afraid he saw that I was startled."

"Do get on. What else did he ask you?"

"He asked me whether I'd enjoyed last night. He said: 'You were with Dune, weren't you?' He cried, as though he wasn't speaking to me at all: 'That's an odd sort of friend for you to have.' I ought to have been angry I suppose, but I was shaking all over . . . yes . . . well . . . then he said: 'I thought you were in with all those pi men,' and I just couldn't say anything at all—I was shaking so. He must have thought I looked very odd."

"I'm sure he did," said Olva drily. "Well it won't be many days before you give the show away—that's certain."

What could have made him tell the fellow? What madness? What—-?

But Bunning caught on to his sleeve.

"No, no, you mustn't say that, Dune, please, you mustn't. I'm going to do my best, I am really. But his coming suddenly like that, just when I'd been thinking. . . . But it's awful. I told you if any one suspected it would make it so hard—-"

"Look here, Bunning, perhaps it will help you if you know the way that I'm feeling about it. I'll try and explain. All these days there's something in me that's urging me to go out and confess."

"Conscience," said Bunning solemnly.

"No, it isn't conscience at all. It's something quite different, because the thing that's urging me isn't urging me because I've done something I'm ashamed of, it's urging me because I'm in a false position. There's that on the one side, and, on the other, I'm in love with Rupert Craven's sister."

Bunning gave a little cry.

"Yes. That complicates things, doesn't it? Now you see why Rupert Craven is the last person who must know anything about it; it's because he loves his sister so much and suspects, I think, that I care for her, that he's going to find out the truth."

"Does she care for you?" Bunning brought out huskily.

"I don't know. That's what I've got to find out."

"Because it all depends on that. If she cares enough it won't matter what you've done, and if she doesn't care enough it won't matter her knowing because you oughtn't to marry her. Oh," and Bunning's eyes as they gazed at Olva were those, once more, of a devoted dog: "she's lucky." Then he repeated, as though to himself, in his odd husky whisper: "Anything that I can do . . . anything that I can do . . ."

2

On the next evening, about five o'clock, Olva went to the house in Rocket Road. He went through a world that, in its frosty stillness, held beauty in its hands like a china cup, so fragile in its colours, so gentle in its outline, with a moon, round and of a creamy white, with a sky faintly red, and stiff trees, black and sharp.

Cambridge came to Olva then as a very lovely thing. The Cambridge life was a lovely thing with its kindness, its simplicity, its optimism. He was penetrated too with a great sadness because he knew that life of that kind was gone, once and for ever, from him; whatever came to him now it could never again be that peace; the long houses flung black shadows across the white road and God kept him company. . . .

Miss Margaret Craven had not yet come in, but would Mr. Dune, perhaps, go up and see Mrs. Craven? The old woman's teeth chattered in the cold little hall. "We are dead, all of us dead here," the skins on the walls seemed to say; "and you'll be dead soon . . . oh! yes, you will."

Olva went up to Mrs. Craven. The windows of her room were tightly closed and a great fire was blazing; before this she lay stretched out on a sofa of faded green—her black dress, her motionless white hands, her pale face, her moving eyes.

She had beside her to-day a little plate of dry biscuits, and, now and again, her hand would move across her black dress and break one of these with a sharp sound, and then her hand would fall back again.

"I am very glad to see you. Draw your chair to the fire. It is a chill day, but fine, I believe."

She regarded him gravely.

"It is not much of life that I can watch from this room, Mr. Dune. It is good of you to come and see me . . . there must be many other things for you to do."

He came at once to the point.

"I want your permission to ask your daughter to marry me, Mrs. Craven."

There was a long silence between them. He seemed, in his inner consciousness, to be carrying on a dialogue.

"You see," he said to the Shadow, "I have forestalled you. I shall ask Margaret Craven this evening to marry me. You cannot prevent that . . . you cannot."

And a voice answered: "All things betray Thee Who betrayest Me."

"You have known us a very short time, Mr. Dune." Mrs. Craven's voice came to him from a great distance.

He felt as though he were speaking to two persons. "Time has nothing to do with falling in love, Mrs. Craven."

He saw to his intense amazement that she was greatly moved. She, who had always seemed to him a mask, now was suddenly revealed as suffering, tortured, intensely human. Her thin white hands were pressed together.

"I am a lonely, unhappy woman, Mr. Dune. Margaret is now all that is left to me. Everything has been taken from me. Rupert—" Her voice was lost; very slowly tears rolled down her cheeks. She began again desperately. "Margaret is all that I have got. If I were left alone it would be too much for me. I could not endure the silence."

It was the more moving in that it followed such stern reserve. His own isolation, the curious sense that he had that they were, both of them, needing protection against the same power (it seemed to him that if he raised his eyes he would see, on the opposite wall, the shadow of that third Presence); this filled him with the tenderest pity, so that suddenly he bent down and kissed her hand.

She caught his with a fierce convulsive movement, and so they sat in silence whilst he felt the pulse of her hand beat through his body, and once a tear rolled from her cheek on to his wrist.

"You understand . . ." she said at last. "You understand. I have always seen that you know. . ." Then she whispered, "How did you know?"

"Know?" He was bewildered, but before she could speak again the door opened and Margaret Craven came in.

She moved with that restrained emotion that he had seen in her when he had first met her. She was some great force held in check, some fire that blazed but must be hidden from the world, and as she bent over her mother and kissed her the embrace had in it something of passionate protest; both women seemed to assert in it their right to quite another sort of life.

He saw that his moment with Mrs. Craven had passed. That fire, that humanity had gone from her and she lay back now on her sofa with the faint waxen lids closed upon her eyes, her hands thinly folded, almost a dead woman.

Margaret kissed her again—now softly and gently, and Olva went with her from the room.

3

He was prepared to find that Rupert had told her everything. He thought that he saw in the gravity and sadness of her manner, and also in the silence that she seemed deliberately at first to place between them, that she was waiting for the right moment to break it to him. He felt that she would ask him gravely and with great kindness, but that, in the answer that he would give her, it must be all over . . . the end. The pursuit would be concluded.

Then suddenly in the way that she looked at him he knew that she had been told nothing.

"I'm afraid that mother is very unwell. I'm afraid that you must have found her so."

"If she could get away—-" he began.

"Ah! if we could all get away! If only we could! But we have talked of that before. It is quite impossible. And, even if we could (and how glad I should be!), I do not know that it would help mother. It is Rupert that is breaking her heart!"

"Rupert!"

For answer to his exclamation she cried to him with all the pent-up suffering and loneliness of the last weeks in her voice—

"Ah, Mr. Dune, help me! I shall go mad if something doesn't happen; every day it is worse and I can't grapple with it. I'm not up to it. If only they'd speak out! but it's this silence!" She seemed to pull herself together and went on more quietly: "You know that Rupert and I have been everything to one another all our lives. We have never had a secret of any kind. Until this last month Rupert was the most open, dearest boy in the world. His tenderness with my mother was a most wonderful thing, and to me!—I cannot tell you what he was to me. I suppose, for the very reason that we were so much to one another, we did not make any other very close friends. I had girls in Dresden, of course, and there were men at school and college for whom he cared, but I think there can have been few brothers and sisters who were so entirely together in every way. A month ago that all ceased."

She flung her head back with a sharp defiant movement as though the memory of it hurt her.

"I've told you this before. I talked to you about it when you were here last. But since then he has become much worse and I am afraid that anything may happen. I have no one to go to. It is killing my mother, and then—you were a friend of his."

"I hope that I am now."

"That is the horrible part of it. But it seems now that all this agitation, this trouble, is directed against you."

"Against me"

"Yes, the other evening he spoke about you—here—furiously. He said you must never come here again, that I must never speak to you again. He said that you had done dreadful things. And then when I asked him he could not tell me anything. He seemed—and you must look on it in that light, Mr. Dune—as though he were not in the least responsible for what he said. I'm afraid he is very, very ill. He is dreadfully unhappy, and yet he can explain nothing. I too have been very unhappy, and mother, because we love him."

"If he wishes that I should not come here again—-" Olva began.

"But he is not responsible. He really does not know what he is doing. He never had the smallest trouble that he did not confide it to me, and now—-"

"I have noticed, of course," Olva said "that lately his manner to me has been strange. I would have helped him if he would let me, but he will not. He will have nothing to say to me . . . I too have been very sorry about it. I have been sorry because I am fond of Rupert, but also—there is another, stronger reason—because I love you, Margaret."

As he spoke he got up and stood by her chair. He saw her take in his last words, at first with a wondering gravity, then with a sudden splendour so that light flooded her face; her arms made a little helpless gesture, and she caught his hand.

He drew her up to him out of her chair; then, with a fierce passionate movement, they held one another and clung together as though in a desperate wild protest against the world.

"You can't touch me now—I've got her," he seemed to fling at the blank face of the old mirror.

It was his act of defiance, but through his exultation he caught the whisper—it might again have been conveyed to him through the shrill shivering notes of the "Valse Triste"—"Tell her—tell her—now. Trust her. Dear son, trust Me . . . it must be so in the end."

"Now," he heard her say, "I can stand it all."

"When you came into this room weeks ago," she went on, "I loved you; from the very first instant. Now I do not mind what any one can do."

"I too loved you from the first instant."

"You were so grave. I tried at first not to think of you as a person at all because I thought that it was safer, and then gradually, although I fought against you, I could not keep you out. You drove your way in. You understood so wonderfully the things that I wanted you to understand. Then Rupert and mother drove me to want you more and more. I thought that you liked me, but I didn't know. . . ." Then with a little shiver she clung to him, pressing close to him. "Oh! hold me, hold me safe."

The room was now gathering to itself that dusk that gave it its strangest air. The fire had fallen low and only shone now in the recesses of the high fireplace with a dull glimmer. Amongst the shadows it seemed that the Presence was gravely waiting. As Olva held Margaret in his arms he felt that he was fighting to keep her.

In the dark hollow of the mirror he thought that he saw the long white road, the mists, the little wood and some one running. . . .

It seemed to him that Margaret was not there, that the room was dark and very heavy, that some bell was ringing in his ear. . . . Then about him a thousand voices were murmuring: "Tell her—tell her—tell her the truth."

With a last effort he tried to cry "I will not tell her."

His lips broke on her name "Margaret." Then, with a little sigh, tumbling forward, he fainted.



CHAPTER XIII

MRS. CRAVEN

1

Afterwards, lying in his easy chair before his fire, he was allowed a brief and beautiful respite. It was almost as though he were already dead—as though, consciously, he might lie there, apart from the world, freed from the eternal pursuit, at last unharassed, and hold, with both hands, that glorious certainty—Margaret.

He had a picture of her now. He was lying where he had tumbled, there on the floor with the silver trays and boxes, the odd tables, the gimcrack chairs all about him. Slowly he had opened his eyes and had gazed, instantly, as though the gates of heaven had rolled back for him, into her face. She was kneeling on the floor, one hand was behind his head, the other bathed his forehead. He could see her breasts (so little, so gentle) rise and fall beneath her thin dress, and her great dark eyes caught his soul and held it.

In that one great moment God withdrew. For the first time in his knowledge of her they were alone, and in the kiss that he gave to her when he drew her down to him they met for the first time. Death and the anger of God might come to him—that great moment could never be taken from him. It was his. . . .

He had seen that she was gravely distressed with his fainting, and he had been able to give her no reason beyond the heat of the room. He could see that she was puzzled and felt that there was some mystery there that she was not to know, but she too had found in that last kiss a glorious certainty that no other hazard could possibly destroy.

He loved her—she loved him. Let the Gods thunder!

But he knew, nevertheless, as he lay back there in the chair, that he had received a sign. That primrose path with Margaret was not to be allowed him, and so sure was he that now he could lie back and look at it all as though he were a spectator and wonder in what way God intended to work it out. The other side of him—the fighting, battling creature—was, for the moment, dormant. Soon Bunning would come in and then the fight would begin again, but for the instant there was peace—the first peace that he had known since that far-away evening in St. Martin's Chapel.

As with a drowning man (it is said) so now with Olva his past life stretched, in panorama, before him. He saw the high rocky grey building with its rough shape and shaggy lichen, its neglected courtyard, its iron-barred windows, the gaunt trees, like witches, that hemmed it, the white ribbon of road, far, far below it, the shining gleam of the river hidden by purple hills. He saw his father—huge, flowing grey beard, eyebrows stuck, like leeches, on to his weather-beaten face, his gnarled and knotted hands. He saw himself a tiny boy with thin black hair and grave eyes watching his father as he bathed in the mill-pool below the house—his father rising naked from the stream, hung with the mists of early morning, naked with enormous chest, huge flanks, his beard black then and sweeping across his breast, his great thighs shining with the dripping water—primitive, primeval, in the heart of the early morning silence.

Many, many other pictures of those first days, but always Olva and his father, moving together, speaking but seldom, sitting before the fire in the evenings, watching the blaze, despising the world. The contempt that his father had for his fellow-beings! Had a man ever been so alone? Olva himself had drunk of that same contempt and welcomed his solitude at Harrow. The world had been with him a place of war, of hostility, until he had struck that blow in Sannet Wood. He remembered the eagerness with which, at the end of term, he had hastened back to his father. After the noise and clatter of school life how wonderful to go back to the still sound of dripping water, to the crackle of dry leaves under foot, to the heavy solemn tread of cattle, to those evenings when at his father's side he heard the coals click in the fire and the old clock on the stairs wheeze out the passing minutes. That relationship with his father bad been, until this term, the only emotion in his life—and now? And now!

It was incredible this change that had come to him. First there was Margaret and then, after her, Mrs. Craven, Rupert, Lawrence, Cardillac, Bunning. All these persons, in varying degree, bad become of concern to him. The world that had always been a place of smoke, of wind, of sky, was now, of a sudden, crowded with figures. He bad been swept from the hill-top down into the market-place. He had been given perhaps one keen glance of a moving world before he was drawn from it altogether. . . . Now, just as he had tasted human companionship and loved it, must he die?

He knew, too, that his recent popularity in the College had pleased him. He wanted them to like him . . . he was proud to feel that because he was he therefore Cardillac resigned, willingly, his place to him. But if Cardillac knew him for a felon, knew that he might be hanged in the dark and flung into a nameless grave, what then? If Cardillac knew what Rupert Craven almost knew, would not his horror be the same? The world, did it only know. . . .

To-morrow was the day of the Dublin match. Olva and Cardillac were both playing, and at the end of the game choice might be made between them. Did Olva care? He did not know . . . but Margaret was coming, and, in the back of his mind, he wanted to show her what he could do.

And yet, whilst that Shadow hovered in the Outer Court, how little a thing this stir and movement was! No tumult that the material world could ever make could sound like that whisper that was with him now again in the room—with him at his very heart—"All things betray Thee. . . ."

The respite was over. Bunning came in.

Change had seized Bunning. Here now was the result of his having pulled himself together. Olva could see that the man bad made up his mind to something, and that, further, he was resolved to keep his purpose secret. It was probably the first occasion in Bunning's life of such resolution. There was a faint colour in the fat cheeks, the eyes bad a little light and the man scarcely spoke at all lest this purpose should trickle from his careless lips. Also as he looked at Olva his customary devotion was heightened by an air of frightened pride.

Olva, watching him, was apprehensive—the devotion of a fool is the most dangerous thing in creation.

"Well, have you seen Craven again?"

"Yes. We had a talk."

"What did he say?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Rot. He didn't stop and talk to you about the weather. Come on, Bunning, what have you been up to?"

"I haven't been up to anything."

The man's lips were closed. For another half an hour Bunning sat in a chair before the fire—silent. Every now and again he flung a glance at Olva. Sometimes he jerked his head towards the window as though he heard a step.

He had the look of a Christian going into the amphitheatre to face the Beasts.

2

About eleven o'clock of the next morning Olva went to see Margaret. He had written to her the night before and asked her not to tell Rupert the news of their engagement immediately, but, when the morning came, he could not rest with that. He must know more.

It was a damp, misty morning, the fine frost had gone. He was going to Margaret to try and recover some reality out of the state that he was in. The recent incidents—Craven's suspicions, the 5th of November evening, Bunning's alarm, the scene with Margaret—bad dragged him for a time from that conviction that he was living in an unreal world. That day when he had run in the snowstorm from Sannet Wood had seemed to him, during these last weeks, absurd and an effect, obviously, of excited nerves. Now, on this morning of the Dublin match, he awoke again to that unreal condition. The bedmaker, the men passing through the Court beneath his windows, the porter at the gate—these people were unreal, and above him, around him, the mist seemed ever about to break into new terrible presences.

"This thing is wearing me down. I shall go off my head if something definite doesn't happen"—and then, there in his room with the stupid breakfast things still on the table, the consciousness of the presence of God seized him so that he felt as though the pursuit were suddenly at an end and there was nothing left now but complete submission.

In this world of wraiths, God was the most certain Presence. . . .

There remained only Margaret. Perhaps she could recover reality for him. He went to her.

He found her waiting for him in the little drawing-room and he could not see her. He knew then that the Pursuing Shadow had taken a new step. It was literally physically true. The room was there, the shining things, the knick-knacks, the mirror, the scent of oranges. He could see her body, her black dress, her eyes, her white neck, the movement towards him that she made when she saw him coming, but there was nothing there. It was as though he had been asked to love a picture.

He could not think of her at all as Margaret Craven or of himself as Olva Dune. Only in the glass's reflection he saw the white road stretching to the wood.

"I really am going off my head. She'll see that something's up"—and then from the bottom of his heart, far away as though it had been the cry of another person, "Oh! how I want her How I want her!"

He took her in his arms and kissed her and felt as though he were dead and she were dead and that they were both, being so young am eager for life, struggling to get back existence again.

Her voice came to him from a long distance "Olva, how ill you look! What is it? What won't you tell me? There's something the matter with you all and you all keep me in the dark."

He said nothing and she went on very gently, "It would be so much better, dear, if you were to tell me. After all, I'm part of you now, aren't I? Perhaps I can help you."

His own voice, from a long distance, said: "I don't think that you can help me, Margaret."

She put her hand on his arm and looked up into his face. "I am trying to help you all, but it is so difficult if you will tell me nothing. And, Olva dear, if it is something that you have done—something that you are afraid to tell me—believe me, dear, that there's nothing—nothing in the world—that you could have done that would matter to me now. I love you—nothing can alter that."

He tried to feel that the hand on his arm was real. With a great effort he spoke: "Have you told Rupert?"

"Mother told him last night."

"What did he say?"

"I don't know—but they had a terrible scene. Rupert," her lip quivered, "went away without a word last night. Only he told mother that if I would not give you up he would never come into the house again. But he loves me more than any one in the world, and he can't do without me. I know that he can't, and I know that he will come back. Mother wants to see you; perhaps you will go up to her."

She had moved back from him and was looking at him with sad perplexity. He knew that he must seem strange and cold standing there, in the middle of the room, without making any movement towards her, but he could not help himself, he seemed to have no power over his own actions.

Coming up to him she flung her arms round his neck. "Olva, Olva, tell me, I can't endure it"—but slowly he detached himself from her and left her.

As he went through the dark close passage he wondered how God could be so cruel.

When he came into Mrs. Craven's room he knew that her presence comforted him. The dark figure on the faded sofa by the fire seemed to him now more real than anything else in the world. Although Mrs. Craven made no movement yet he felt that she encouraged him come to her, that she wanted him. The room was very dark and bare, and although a large fire blazed in the hearth, it was cold. Beyond the window a misty world, dank, with dripping trees, stretched to a dim horizon. Mrs. Craven did not turn her eyes from the fire when she heard him enter. He felt as though she were watching him and knew that he had drawn a chair beside the sofa. Suddenly she moved her hand towards him and he took it and held it for a moment.

She turned and he saw that she had been crying.

"I had a talk with my son last night," she said at last, and her voice seemed to him the saddest thing that he had ever heard. "We had always loved one another until lately. Last night he spoke to me as he has never spoken before. He was very angry and I know that he did not mean all that he said to me—but it hurt me."

"I'm afraid, Mrs. Craven, that it was because of me. Rupert is very angry with me and he refuses to consent to Margaret's marriage with me. Is not that so?"

"Yes, but it is not only that. For many weeks now he has not been himself with me. I am not a happy woman. I have had much to make me unhappy. My children are a very great deal to me. I think that this has broken my heart."

"Mrs. Craven, if there is anything that I can do that will put things right, if I can say anything to Rupert, if I can tell him anything, explain anything, I will. I think I can tell you, Mrs. Craven, why it is that Rupert does not wish me to marry Margaret. I have something to confess—to you."

Then he was defeated at last? He had surrendered? In another moment the words "I killed Carfax and Rupert knows that I killed him" would have left his lips—but Mrs. Craven had not heard his words. Her face was turned away from him again and she spoke in a strange, monotonous voice as one speaks in a dream.

The words seemed to be created out of the faded sofa, the misty window, the dim shadowy bed. She was crying—her hands were pressed to her face—the words came between her sobs.

"It is too much for me. All these years I have kept silence. Now I can bear it no longer. If Rupert leaves me, it will kill me, but unless I speak to some one I shall die of all this silence, . . . I cannot bear any longer to be alone with God."

Was it his own voice? Were these his own words? Had things gone so far with him that he did not know—"I cannot bear any longer to be alone with God. . . ." Was not that his own perpetual cry?

"Mr. Dune, I killed my husband."

In the silence that followed the only sound was her stifled crying and the crackling fire.

"You knew from the beginning."

"No, I did not know."

"But you were different from all the others. I felt it at once when I saw you. You knew, you understood, you were sorry for me."

"I am sorry. I understand. But I did not know."

"Let me tell you." She turned her face towards him and began to speak eagerly.

He took her hand between his.

"Oh! the relief—now at once—after all these years of silence. Fifteen years. . . . It happened when Rupert was a tiny boy. You see he was a bad man. I found it out almost at once—after a month or two. But I loved him madly—utterly. I did not care about his being bad—that does not matter to a woman—but he set about breaking my heart. It amused him. Margaret was born. He used to terrify me with the things that he would teach her. He said that he would make her as big a devil as he was himself. I prayed God that I might never have another child and then Rupert was born. From that moment my one prayer was that my husband might die.

"At last my opportunity came. He fell ill—dreadful attacks of heart—and one night he had a terrible attack and I held back the medicine that would have saved him. I saw his eyes watching me, pleading for it. I stood and waited . . . he died."

She stopped for a moment—then her words came more slowly: "It was a very little thing—it was not a very bad thing—he was a wicked man . . . but God has punished me and He will punish me until I die. All these years He has pursued me, urging me to confess—I have fought and struggled against it, but at last He has beaten me—He has driven me. . . . Oh! the relief! the relief!"

She looked at him curiously.

"If you did not know, why did I feel that you understood and sympathized? Have you no horror of me now?"

For answer, he bent and kissed her cheek.

"I too am very lonely. I too know what God can do."

Then she clung to him as though she would never let him leave her.



CHAPTER XIV

GOD

1

Half an hour later he was in his room again, and the real world had come back to him. It had come back with the surprise of some supernatural mechanism; it was as though the sofa, chairs, pictures had five minutes before been grass and toadstools in a world of mist and now were sofa, chairs and pictures again.

He was absolutely sane, whereas half an hour ago he had been held almost by an enchantment. If Margaret were here with him now, here in his room—not in that dim, horrible Rocket Road house, raised it might almost seem by the superstitions and mists of his own conscience—ah! how he would love her!

He was filled with a sense of energy and enterprise. He would have it out with Rupert, laugh away his suspicions, reconcile him to the idea of the marriage, finally drag Margaret from that horrible house. As with a man who has furious attacks of neuralgia, and between the agony of them feels, so great is the relief, that no pain will ever come to him again, so Olva was now, for an instant, the Olva of a month ago.

Four times had the Pursuer thus given him respite—on the morning after the murder, in St. Martin's Chapel on that same evening, after his confession to Bunning, and now. But Aegidius, looking down from his wall, saw the strong, stern face of his young friend and loved him and knew that, at last, the pursuit was at an end. . . .

Bunning came in.

2

Bunning came in. The little silver clock had just struck a quarter to one. The match was at half-past two.

Olva knew at his first sight of Bunning that something had happened. The man seemed dazed, he dragged his great legs slowly after him and planted them on the floor as though he wanted something that was secure, like a man who had begun desperately to slip down a crevasse. His back was bowed and his cheeks were flushed as though some one had been striking him, but his eyes told Olva everything. They were the eyes of a child who has been wakened out of sleep and sees Terror.

"What is it? Sit down. Pull yourself together."

"Oh! Dune! . . . My God, Dune!" The man's voice had the unreality of men walking in a cinematograph. "Craven's coming."

"Coming! Where?"

"Here!"

"Now?"

"I don't know—when. He knows."

"You told him?"

"I thought it best. I thought I was doing right. It's all gone wrong. Oh! these last two days! what I've suffered!"

Now for the first time in the history of the whole affair Olva Dune may be said to have felt sheer physical terror, not terror of the mist, of the road, of the darkness, of the night, but terror of physical things—of the loss of light and air, of the denial of food, of physical death. . . . For a moment the room swam about him. He heard, in the Court below him, some men laughing—a dog was barking. Then he saw that Bunning was on the edge of hysteria. The bedmaker would come in and find him laughing—as he had laughed once before.

Olva stilled the room with a tremendous effort—the floor sank, the table and chairs tossed no longer.

"Now, Bunning, tell me quickly. They'll be here to lay lunch in a minute. What have you told Craven? And why have you told him anything?"

"I told him—yesterday—that I did it."

"That you did it?"

"Yes, that I murdered Carfax."

"My God! You fool! . . . You fool!"

A most dangerous thing this devotion of a fool.

But, strangely, Olva's words roused in Bunning a kind of protest, so that he pulled his eyes back into their sockets, steadied his hands, held his boots firmly to the floor, and, quite softly, with a little note of urgency in it as though he were pleading before a great court, said—

"Yes, I know. But he drove me to it; Craven did. I thought it was the only way to save you. He's been at me now for days; ever since that time he stopped me in Outer Court and asked me why I was a friend of yours. He's been coming to my room—at night—at all sorts of times—and just sitting there and looking at me."

Olva came across and touched Bunning's arm: "Poor Bunning! What a brute I was to tell you!"

"He used to come and say nothing—just look at me. I couldn't stand it, you know. I'm not a clever man—not at all clever—and I used to try and think of things to talk about, but it always seemed to come back to Carfax—every time."

"And then—when you told me the other day about your caring for Miss Craven—I felt that I must do something. I'd always puzzled, you know, why I should be brought into it at all. I didn't seem to be the sort of fellow who'd be likely to be mixed up with a man like you. I felt that it must be with some purpose, you know, and now—now—I thought I suddenly saw—

"I don't know—I thought he'd believe me—I thought he'd tell the police and they'd arrest me—and that'd be the end of it."

Here Bunning took a handkerchief and began miserably to gulp and sniff.

"But, good heavens!" Olva cried, "you didn't suppose that they wouldn't discover it all at the police-station in a minute! Two questions and you'd be done! Why, man——!"

"I didn't know. I thought it would be all right. I was all alone that afternoon, out for a walk by myself—and you'd told me how you did it. I'd only got to tell the same story. I couldn't see how any one should know—-I couldn't really . . . I don't suppose"—many gulps—"that I thought much about that—I only wanted to save you."

How bright and wonderful the day! How full of colour the world! And it was all over, all absolutely, finally done.

"Now—look here, stop that sniffing—it's all right. I'm not angry with you. Just tell me exactly what you said to Craven yesterday when you told him."

Bunning thought. "Well, he came into my room quite early after my breakfast. I was reading my Bible, as I used to, you know, every morning, to see whether I could be interested again, as I used to be. I was finding I couldn't when Craven came in. He looked queer. He's been looking queerer every day, and I don't think he's been sleeping. Then he began to ask me questions, not actually about anything, but odd questions like, Where was I born? and Why did I read the Bible? and things like that—just to make me comfortable—and his eyes were so funny, red and small and never still. Then he got to you."

The misery now in Bunning's eyes was more than Olva could bear. It was dumb, uncomprehending misery, the unhappiness of something caught in a trap—and that trap this glittering dancing world!

"Then he got to you! He always asked me the same questions. How long I'd known you?—Why we got on together when we were so different?—silly meaningless things—and he didn't listen to my answers. He was always thinking of the next things to ask and that frightened me so."

The misery in Bunning's eyes grew deeper.

"Suddenly I thought I saw what was meant—that I was intended to take it on myself. It made me warm all over, the though of it. . . . Now, I was going to do something . . . that's how I saw it!"

"Going to do something . . ." he repeated desperately, with choking sobs between the words. "It's all happened so quickly. He had just said absently, not looking at me, 'You like Dune, don't you?'

"When I came out with it all at once—-I said, 'Yes, I know, I know what you want. You think that Dune killed Carfax and that I know he did, but he didn't I killed Carfax. . . .'"

Bunning's voice quite rang out. His eyes now desperately sought Olva's face, as though he would find there something that would make the world less black.

"I wasn't frightened—-not then—-that was the odd thing. The only thing I thought about was saving you—-getting you out of it. I didn't see! I didn't see!"

"And then—-what did Craven say?" Olva asked quietly.

"Craven said scarcely anything. He asked me whether I realized what I was saying, whether I saw what I was in for? I said 'Yes'—-that it had all been too much for my conscience, that I had to tell some one—-all the things that you told me. Then he asked me why I'd done it. I told him because Carfax always bullied me—-he did, you know—-and that one day I couldn't stand it any longer and I met him in the wood and hit him. He said, 'You must be very strong,' and of course I'm not, you know, and that ought to have made me suspect something. But it didn't. . . . Then he said he must think over what he ought to do, but all the time he was saying it I knew he was thinking of something else and then he went away."

"That was yesterday morning?"

"Yesterday morning, and all day I was terrified, but happy too. I thought I'd done a big thing and I thought that the police would come and carry me off. . . . Nothing happened all day. I sat there waiting. And I thought of you—-that you'd be able to marry Miss Craven and would be very happy.

"Then, this morning, coming from chapel, Craven stopped me. I thought he was going to tell me that he'd thought it his duty to give me away. He would, you know. But it wasn't that.

"All he said was: 'I wonder how you know so much about it, Bunning.' I couldn't say anything. Then he said, 'I'm going to ask Dune.' That was all . . . all," he wretchedly repeated, and then, with a movement of utter despair, flung his head into his hands, and cried.

Olva, standing straight with his hands at his side, looked through his window at the world—-at the white lights on the lower sky, at the pearl grey roofs and the little cutting of dim white street and the high grey college wall. He was to begin again, it seemed, at the state in which he'd been on the day after Carfax's murder. Then he had been sure that arrest would only be a question of hours and he had resolutely faced it with the resolve that he would drain all the life, all the vigour, all the fun from the minutes that remained to him.

Now he had come back to that. Craven would give him away, perhaps . . . he would, at any rate, drive him away from Margaret. But he would almost certainly feel it his duty to expose him. He would feel that that would end the complication with his sister once and for all—-the easiest way. He would feel it his duty—-these people and their duty!

Well, at least he would have his game of football first—-no one could take his afternoon away from him. Margaret would be there to watch him and he would play! Oh! he would play as he had never played in his life before!

Bunning's voice came to him from a great distance—-

"What are you going to do? What are you going to say to Craven?"

"Say to him? Why, I shall tell him, of course—-tell him everything."

Bunning leapt from his chair. In his urgency he put his hands on Olva's arm: "No, no, no. You mustn't do that. Why it will be as though I'd murdered you. Tell him I did it. Make him believe it. You can—-you're clever enough. Make him feel that I did it. You mustn't, mustn't—-let him know. Oh, please, please. I'll kill myself if you do. I will really."

Olva gravely, quietly, put his hands on Bunning's shoulders.

"It's all right—-it had to come out. I've been avoiding it all this time, escaping it, but it had to come. Don't you be afraid of it. I daresay Craven won't do anything. After all he loves his sister and she cares for him. That will influence him. But, anyhow, all that's done with. There are bigger things in question than Craven knowing about Carfax, and you were meant to tell him—-you were really. You've just forced me to see what's the right thing to do—-that's all."

Bunning was, surely, in the light of it, a romantic figure.

Miss Annett came in with the lunch.

3

As Olva was changing into his football things, Cardillac appeared.

"Come up to the field with me, will you? I've got a hansom."

Olva finished tying his boots and stood up. Cardillac looked at him.

"My word, you seem fit."

"Yes, I'm splendid, thanks."

He felt splendid. Never before had he been so conscious of the right to be alive. His football clothes smelt of the earth and the air. He moved his arms and legs with wonderful freedom. His blood was pumping through his body as though death, disease, infirmity such things—-were of another planet.

For such a man as he there should only be air, love, motion, the begetting of children, the surprising splendour of a sudden death. Now already Craven was waiting for him.

He had sent a note round to Craven's rooms; he had said, "Come in to see me after the match—-five o'clock. I have something to tell you."

At five o'clock then. . . .

Meanwhile it was nice of Cardillac to come. They exchanged no words about it, but they understood one another entirely. It was as though Cardillac had said—-"I expect that you're going to knock me out of this Rugger Blue as you knocked me out of the Wolves, and I want to show you that we're pals all the way through."

What Cardillac really said was—-"Have a cigarette? These are Turkish. Feel like playing a game to-day?"

"Never felt better in my life."

"Well, these Dublin fellows haven't had their line crossed yet this season. May one of us have the luck to do it."

"Pretty hefty lot of forwards."

"Yes, O'Brien's their spot Three I believe."

Olva and Cardillac attracted much attention as they walked through the College. Miss Annett, watching them from a little window where she washed plates, gulped in her thin throat with pride for "that Mr. Dune. There's a gentleman!" The sun above the high grey buildings broke slowly through yellow clouds. The roads were covered with a thin fine mud and, from the earth, faint clouds of mist rose and vanished into a sky that was slowly crumbling from thick grey into light watery blue.

The cold air beat upon their faces as the hansom rattled past Dunstan's, over the bridge, and up the hill towards the field.

Cardillac talked. "There goes Braff. He doesn't often come up to a game nowadays—must be getting on for seventy—the greatest half the 'Varsity's ever had, I suppose."

"It's a good thing this mud isn't thicker. It won't make the ball bad. That game against Monkstown the other day! My word. . . ."

But Olva was not listening. It seemed to him now that two separate personalities were divided in him so sharply that it was impossible to reconcile them.

There was Olva Dune concentrating all his will, his mentality, upon the game that he was about to play. This was his afternoon. After it there would be darkness, death, what you will—parting from Margaret—all purely physical emotions.

The other Olva felt nothing physical. The game, confession to Rupert, trial, imprisonment, even separation from Margaret, all these things were nothing in comparison with some great business that was in progress behind it all, as real life may go on behind the painted back cloth of a stage. Here were amazing happenings, although at present he was confused and bewildered by them. It was not that Olva was, actually, at the instant conscious of actual impressions, but rather that great emotions, great surprising happiness, seemed to shine on some horizon. It was as though something had said to his soul, "Presently you will feel a joy, a splendour, that you had never in your wildest thoughts imagined."

The pursuit was almost at an end. He was now enveloped, enfolded. Already everything to him—even his love for Margaret—was trivial in comparison with the effect of some atmosphere that was beginning to hem him in on every side.

But against all this was the other Olva—the Olva who desired physical strength, love, freedom, health.

Well, let it all be as confusing as it might, he would play his game. But as he walked into the Pavilion he knew that the prelude to his real life had only a few more hours to run. . . .

4

As he passed, with the rest of the team, up the field, he observed two things only; one thing was Margaret, standing on the left side of the field just below the covered stand—he could see her white face and her little black hard hat.

The other thing was that on the horizon where the wall at the further end of the field cut the sky there were piled, as though resting on the top of the wall, high white clouds. For a moment these clouds, piled in mountain shape of an intense whiteness with round curving edges, held his eyes because they exactly resembled those clouds that had hung above him on the day of his walk to Sannet Wood—the day when he had been caught by the snowstorm. These clouds brooded, waiting above him; their dazzling white had the effect of a steady, unswerving gaze.

They lined out. He took his place as centre three-quarter with Cardillac outside left and Tester and Buchan on the other wing. Old Lawrence was standing, a solid rock of a figure, back. There was a great crowd present. The tops of the hansom cabs in the road beyond rose above the wall, and he could hear, muffled with distance, shots from the 'Varsity firing range.

All these things focussed themselves upon his brain in the moment before the whistle went; the whistle blew, the Dublin men had kicked off, Tester had fielded the ball, sent it back into touch, and the game had begun.

This was to be the game of his life and yet he could not centre his attention upon it. He was conscious that Whymper—the great Whymper—was acting as linesman and watching every movement. He knew that for most of that great crowd his was the figure that was of real concern, he knew that he was as surely battling for his lady as though he had been fighting, tournament-wise, six hundred years ago.

But it all seemed of supreme unimportance. To-night he was to face Rupert, to state, once and for all, that he had killed Carfax, to submit Margaret to a terrible test . . . even that of no importance. All life was insignificant beside something that was about to happen; before the gaze of that white dazzling cloud be felt that he stood, a little pigmy, alone on a brown spreading field.

The game was up at the University end. The Dublin men were pressing and the Cambridge forwards seemed to have lost their heads. It was a case now of "scrum," lining out, and "scrum" again. The Cambridge men got the ball, kept it between their heels and tried, desperately to wheel with it and carry it along with them. It escaped them, dribbled out of the scrimmage, the Cambridge half leapt upon it, but the Dublin man was upon him before he could get it away. It was on the ground again, the Dublin forwards dribbled it a little and then some one, sweeping it into his arms, fell forward with it, over the line, the Cambridge men on top of him.

Dublin had scored a try, and a goal from an easy angle followed—Dublin five points.

They all moved back to the centre of the field and now the Cambridge men, rushing the ball from a line-out in their favour, pressed hard. At last the ball came to the three-quarters. Tester caught it, it passed to Buchan, who as he fell flung it right out to Cardillac; Cardillac draw his man, swerved, and sent it back to Olva. As Olva felt the neat hard surface of it, as he knew that the way was almost clear before him, his feet seemed clogged with heavy weights. Something was about to happen to him—something, but not this. The crowd behind the ropes were shouting, he knew that he was himself running, but it seemed that only his body was moving, his real self was standing back, gazing at those white clouds—waiting.

He knew that he made no attempt to escape the man in front of him; he seemed to run straight into his arms; he heard a little sigh go up from behind the ropes, as he tumbled to the ground, letting the ball trickle feebly from his fingers. A try missed if ever one was!

No one said anything, but he felt the disappointment in the air. He knew what they were saying—"One of Dune's off days! I always said you couldn't depend upon the man. He's just too sidey to care what happens. . . ."

Well they might say it if they would; his eyes were on the horizon.

But his failure had had its effect. Let there be an individualist in the line and Tester and Buchan would play their well-ordered game to perfection. They relied as a rule upon Whymper—to-day they had depended upon Dune. Well Dune had failed them, the forwards were heeling so slowly, the scrum-half was never getting the ball away—it was a miserable affair.

The Dublin forwards pressed again. For a long time the two bodies of men swayed backwards and forwards; in the University twenty-five Lawrence was performing wonders. He seemed to be everywhere at once, bringing men down, seizing, in a lightning flash of time, his opportunity for relieving by kicking into touch.

Twice the ball went to the Dublin three-quarters and they seemed certainly in, but on the first occasion a man slipped and on the second Olva caught his three-quarter and brought him sharply to the ground. It was the only piece of work that he had done.

More struggling—then away on the right some Dublin man had caught it and was running. Some one dashed at him to hurl him into touch, but he slipped past and was in.

Another try—the kick was again successful—Dublin ten points.

The half-time whistle blew. As the met gathered into groups in the middle of the field, sucking lemons and gathering additional melancholy there from, Olva stood a little away from them. Whymper came out into the field to exhort and advise. As he passed Olva he said—

"Rather missed that try of yours. Ought to have gone a bit faster."

He did not answer, it seemed to be no concern of his at all. He was now trembling it every limb, but his excitement had nothing to do with the game. It seemed to him that the earth and the sky were sharing his emotion am he could feel in the air a great exaltation. I was becoming literally true for him that earth air, sky were praising at this moment, in wonderful unison, some great presence.

"All things betray Thee who betrayest Me. . . ." Now he understood what that line had intended him to feel—the very sods crushed by his boots were leading him to submission.

The whistle sounded. His back now was turned to the white clouds; he was facing the high stone wall and the tops of the hansom cabs.

The game began again. The Dublin men were determined to drive their advantage to victory. Another goal and their lead might settle, once and for all, the issue.

Olva was standing back, listening. The earth was humming like a top. A voice seemed to be borne on the wind—"Coming, Coming, Coming."

He felt that the clouds were spreading behind him and a little wind seemed to be whispering in the grass—"Coming, Coming, Coming." His very existence now was strung to a pitch of expectation.

As in a dream he saw that a Dublin man with the ball had got clear away from the clump of Cambridge forwards, and was coming towards him. Behind him only was Lawrence. He flung himself at the man's knees, caught them, falling himself desperately forward. They both came crashing to the ground. It was a magnificent collar, and Olva, as he fell, heard, as though it were miles away, a rising shout, saw the sky bend down to him, saw the ball as it was jerked up rise for a moment into the air—was conscious that some one was running.

5

He was on his knees, alone, on the vast field that sloped a little towards the horizon.

Before him the mountain clouds were now lit with a clear silver light so dazzling that his eyes were lowered.

About him was a great silence. He was himself minute in size, a tiny, tiny bending figure.

Many years passed.

A great glory caught the colour from the sky and earth and held it like a veil before the cloud.

In a voice of the most radiant happiness Olva cried—

"I have fled—I am caught—I am held . . . Lord, I submit."

And for the second time he heard God's voice—

"My Son . . . My Son."

He felt a touch—very gentle and tender—on his shoulder.

6

Many years had passed. He opened his eyes and saw the ball that had been rising, many years ago, now falling.

The man whom he had collared was climbing to his feet; behind them men were bending down for a "scrum." The shout that he had heard when he had fallen was still lingering in the air.

And yet many years had passed.

"Hope you're not hurt," the Dublin man said. "Came down hard."

"No, thanks, it's all right."

Olva got on to his feet. Some one cried, "Well collared, Dune."

He ran back to his place. Now there was no hesitation or confusion. A vigour like wine filled his body. The Cambridge men now were pressing; the ball was flung back to Cardillac, who threw to Olva. The Dublin line was only a few yards away and Olva was over. Lawrence kicked a goal and Cambridge had now five points to the Dublin ten.

Cambridge now awoke to its responsibilities. The Dublin men seemed to be flagging a little, and Tester and Buchan, having apparently decided that Olva was himself again, played their accustomed game.

But what had happened to Dune? There he had been his old casual superior self during the first half of the game. Now he was that inspired player that the Harlequin match had once revealed him. Whymper had spoken to him at half-time. That was what it was—Whymper had roused him.

For he was amazing. He was everywhere. Even when he had been collared, he was suddenly up, had raced after the three-quarter line, caught them up and was in the movement again. Five times the Cambridge Threes were going, were half-way down the field, and were checked by the wonderful Dublin defence. Again and again Cambridge pressed. There were only ten minutes left for play and Cambridge were still five points behind.

Somebody standing in the crowd said, "By Jove, Dune seems to be enjoying it. I never saw any one look as happy."

Some one else said, "Dune's possessed by a devil or something. I never saw anything like that pace. He doesn't seem to be watching the game at all, though."

Some one said, "There's going to be a tremendous snowstorm in a minute. Look at those white clouds."

Then, when there were five minutes more to play, there was a forward rush over the Dublin line—a Cambridge man, struggling at the bottom of a heap of legs and arms, touched down. A Dublin appeal was made for "Carried over," but—no—"Try for Cambridge."

A deafening shout from behind the ropes, then a breathless pause whilst Lawrence stepped back to take the kick, then a shattering roar as the ball sailed between the posts.

Ten points all and three minutes left to play.

They were back to the centre, the Dublin men had kicked, Tester had gathered and returned to touch. There was a line-out, a Cambridge man had the ball and fell, Cambridge dribbled past the ball to the half, the ball was in Cardillac's hands.

Let this be ever to Cardillac's honour! Fame of a lifetime might have been his, the way was almost clear before him—he passed back to Olva. The moment had come. The crowd fell first into a breathless silence, then screamed with excitement—

"Dune's got it. He's off!"

He had a crowd of men upon him. Handing off, bending, doubling, almost down, slipping and then up again—he was through them.

The great clouds were gathering the grey sky into their white arms. Mr. Gregg, at the back of the stand, forgetting for once decorum, white and trembling, was hoarse with shouting.

Olva's body seemed so tiny on that vast field—two Dublin three-quarters came for him. He appeared to run straight into the arms of both of them and then was through them. They started after him—one man was running across field to catch him. It was a race. Now there fell silence as the three men tore after the flying figure. Surely never, in the annals of Rugby football, had any one run as Olva ran then. Only now the Dublin back, and he, missing the apparent swerve to the right, clutched desperately at Olva's back, caught the buckle of his "shorts" and stood with the thing torn off in his hand.

He turned to pursue, but it was too late. Olva had touched down behind the posts.

As he started back with the ball the wide world seemed to be crying and shouting, waving and screaming.

Against the dull grey sky far away an ancient cabman, standing on the top of his hansom, flourished his whip.

But as he stood there the shouting died—the crowds faded—alone there on the brown field with the white high clouds above him, Olva was conscious, only, of the gentle touch of a hand on his shoulder.



CHAPTER XV

PRELUDE TO A JOURNEY

1

He had a bath, changed his clothes, and sitting before his fire waited.