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 blank faces. He went back to the cottage to burn more manuscripts and pack up.

And then, like a revelation, he decided he would come back. He would use all his strength, put himself against all the authorities, and in a month or two he would come back. Before the snow-drops came in the farm garden.

"I shall be back in a month or two—three months," he said to everybody, and they looked at him.

But John Thomas said to him:

"You remember you said you would never drive to town again. Eh?" And in the black, bright eyes Somers saw that it was so. Yet he persisted.

"It only meant not yet awhile."

On the Monday morning he went down to say good-bye at the farm. It was a bitter moment, he was so much attached to them. And they to him. He could not bear to go. Only one was not there—the Uncle James. Many a time Somers wondered why Uncle James had gone down the fields, so as not to say good-bye.

John Thomas was driving them down in the trap—Arthur had taken the big luggage in the cart. The family at the farm did everything they could. Somers never forgot that while he and Harriet were slaving, on the Sunday, to get things packed, John Thomas came up with their dinners, from the farm Sunday dinner.

It was a lovely, lovely morning as they drove across the hill-slopes above the sea: Harriet and Somers and John Thomas. In spite of themselves they felt cheerful. It seemed like an adventure.

"I don't know," said John Thomas, "but I feel in myself as if it was all going to turn out for the best." And he smiled in his bright, wondering way.

"So do I," cried Harriet. "As if we were going to be more free."

"As if we were setting out on a long adventure," said Somers.

They drove through the town, where, of course, they were marked people. But it was curious how little they cared, how indifferent they felt to everybody.

At the station Somers bade good-bye to John Thomas, with whom he had been such friends.