the bits of cat-heather were coming pink in tufts, like a sprinkling of
sacrificial blood.

His heart went back to the savage old spirit of the place: the desire
for old gods, old, lost passions, the passion of the cold-blooded,
darting snakes that hissed and shot away from him, the mystery of
blood-sacrifices, all the lost, intense sensations of the primeval people
of the place, whose passions seethed in the air still, from those long
days before the Romans came. The seethe of a lost, dark passion in the
air. The presence of unseen snakes.

A queer, baffled, half-wicked look came on his face. He could not
stay long at the cottage. Suddenly he must swing on to his bicycle and
go--anywhere. Anywhere, away from the place. He would stay a few days
with his mother in the old home. His mother adored him and grieved as a
mother would. But the little, baffled, half-wicked smile curled on his
face, and he swung away from his mother's solicitude as from everything
else.

Always moving on--from place to place, friend to friend: and always
swinging away from sympathy. As soon as sympathy, like a soft hand, was
reached out to touch him, away he swerved, instinctively, as a harmless
snake swerves and swerves and swerves away from an outstretched hand.
Away he must go. And periodically he went back to Winifred.

He was terrible to her now, like a temptation. She had devoted herself to
her children and her church. Joyce was once more on her feet; but, alas!
lame, with iron supports to her leg, and a little crutch. It was strange
how she had grown into a long, pallid, wild little thing. Strange that
the pain had not made her soft and docile, but had brought out a wild,