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 ing you. I came as soon as I heard you were home."

He was walking with his hands clasped behind him, his dark brows puckered into a fine line with the effort he was making. He didn't know how to talk to women, at least women like Mary, and, in spite of their old, old friendship, he felt shy with her. With her dead husband and her two children, she seemed so much older and wiser. Some odd, new complication had entered their relationship which made it all difficult and confused. Yet she seemed to take it calmly, almost sadly.

"Tell me," she said presently. "Philip, tell me about yourself. You don't mean to go back?" She halted and looked at him squarely.

"No, I don't mean to go back." And all at once he found himself pouring out to her the whole story. He told her how he hated it all from the beginning, how he had begun to doubt, how the doubts had tortured him; how he had prayed and prayed, only to find himself slipping deeper and deeper. He told her of the morning by the lake, of the terrible night of the drums, of the coming of the queer Englishwoman, and the fight that followed, in which his last grain of faith had gone. Suddenly, he realized that he was telling the whole story for the first time. He had never spoken of it before to any one. It was as if all the while, without knowing it, he had been saving it for Mary Conyngham.

"And so," she said, "you've come back to stay. Do you think you'll stay?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. There's nothing else to do."

"And why did you go to work in the Mills?" 