look on it from time to time, as it always helps me when I am away from her.’

As he spoke he pushed the picture gently into my unresisting fingers and closed them over it. ‘My sister Marjorie is a wonderful girl,’ he said, with a bright smile. He was silent for a little while as if musing upon her and then his tender thoughts returned to me.

‘Come away, Raphael,’ he said. ‘Let us be going home. The hour is late, and your mother [Pg 45]may be anxious; and you have her still, whatever else you may have lost.’

[Pg 45]

The grace of his voice conquered me. I rose at the word, staggering a little as I gained my feet, for passion and grief had torn me like devils, and I was faint and bewildered. He slipped his arm into mine and led me away, supporting me as carefully as if I were a woman whom his solicitude was aiding. We exchanged no word together as we went along the downs and through the fields. As we came to the town, however, he paused by the last stile and spoke to me.

‘Dear heart!’ he said, ‘but I am sorry for all this—more sorry than I can say; for I am going away to-morrow.’

The words shook me from myself and my apathy. I gazed in wonder and alarm into his face.

‘I am going away,’ he said, ‘and that’s how I chanced to find you. For I waited in vain for you at Mr. Davies’s, and sought you at your home and found you missing; and then I thought of this old burrow of yours, and here, as good luck would have it, I found you.’

I could only gasp out ‘Going away?’ in a great amazement.

‘I must go away,’ he said. ‘My uncle that was at [Pg 46]sea is in London, with Marjorie, and has sent for me. He needs me, and I am so much beholden to him that I should have to go, even if I were not bound to him by blood and duty, and indeed I long to see my Marjorie.’

[Pg 46]

‘How long will you be away?’ I gasped.

‘I do not know,’ he answered; ‘but it is only a little world after all, and we shall meet again some time, and soon, be sure of that. If not, why, then this parting was well made.’

This last was a quotation from one of his poets and play-makers, as I found afterwards, for the words stuck in my memory, and I happened on them later in a printed book. But indeed I did 

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