Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him

that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.

Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen

before he himself moved. She did not look towards him, and by the

time he reached the door she was half-way down the broad path.

Being dressed up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow her

and reveal himself. But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought

he to do so with the kind of feeling that was awakening in him?

For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the

service, and he had persuaded himself that such was the case, he

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could not altogether be blind to the real nature of the magnetism.

She was such a stranger that the kinship was affectation, and he

said, "It can't be! I, a man with a wife, must not know her!" Still

Sue WAS his own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though

she was not in evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one

sense. It would put all thought of a tender wish on his part out

of Sue's mind, and make her intercourse with him free and fearless.

It was with some heartache that he saw how little he cared for the

freedom and fearlessness that would result in her from such

knowledge.

Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the

pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman Sue Bridehead had an

afternoon's holiday, and leaving the ecclesiastical establishment in

which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk into the country

with a book in her hand. It was one of those cloudless days which

sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet,

as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god. She went along for

a mile or two until she came to much higher ground than that of the

city she had left behind her. The road passed between green fields,

and coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she was

reading, and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles

new and old.

On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a

foreigner with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass

beside a large square board whereon were fixed, as closely as they

could stand, a number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed,

which he was re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way.

They were in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and

comprised divinities of a very different character from those the

girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a Venus of

standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus,

and Mars. Though the figures were many yards away from her the

south-west sun brought them out so brilliantly against the green

herbage that she could discern their contours with luminous

distinctness; and being almost in a line between herself and the

church towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly foreign and

contrasting set of ideas by comparison. The man rose, and, seeing

her, politely took off his cap, and cried "I-i-i-mages!" in an accent

that agreed with his appearance. In a moment he dexterously lifted

upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities divine

and human, and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them on to

her and resting the board on the stile. First he offered her his

smaller wares--the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then

a winged Cupid. She shook her head.




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