“ Pam and the Spawer were no longer flesh and blood; they were the disembodied souls of themselves. They were their own thoughts, disencumbered of the flesh, merged delightfully into each other, and moving by volition amid a world of dreams. Everything that lay about them was symbolised into sublime moral truths, into doctrines of love and charity. All the world, all their doings, were dreams.
They dreamed they left the piano and bought more tea-biscuits at six a penny, and wandered forth (without any consciousness of legs) to redeem their promise to the donkeys. ”

“ Early in the morning after the girl's visit the sun peeped over the Spawer's sill according to custom, and the Spawer jumped out of bed to let him in. Already Nature's symphony was in full swing—a mighty, crescive, spinning movement of industry, borne up to him on a whirr of indefatigable wings. The sun had cleared the cliff railings and was traveling merrily upward on an unimpeded course, though still the grassland lay grey in the shadow beneath its glistening quilt of dew, and every spider's web hung silver-weighted like a net new-drawn with treasure from the sea. ”

“ So near and real and necessitous that the Spawer's elbows kicked backward from the keys, and the pedals went off like triggers under his feet as he spun round to the window. And yet, so far, so remote in probability, that even while he turned, he found far easier to account for it as some acute, psychical manifestation of his own emotions, rather than the expression of any agency from without. Through faith in this feeling, and no fear of it, he flung up the blind abruptly, and thrust forth his head with a peremptory "Who's there?"
Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. ”

“ When spirits are so emancipated from the material that a breath can almost blow them; when life seems to have lost all root in worldly soil, but is merely the blessed sweet odor, hovering above the blossom of existence. While the Spawer played the sky deepened. It seemed to descend like a beneficent angel from heaven and clasp the swing-boats in a celestial embrace, so that they slumbered with the deep peace that comes from above. Pallid harvest stars opened places for themselves in the curtain of blue dusk and peeped down upon the scene. ”

“ And meanwhile, as he removed himself more completely from the girl by resolve, they came closer to each other in spirit. At the piano against the window, looking out upon a poultry-run and the profile of three meagre swing-boats, the Spawer sat down and made music, and the music—even from this cracked, tin-plate, pot-house piano—seemed to sum up all the goodness, all the charity, all the kindness, all the happiness of the day; give it a pure and hallowed expression, as the night's thanksgiving prayer gives blessed articulation to the hidden processes of the soul. ”

“ A very day, indeed, for hot coffee, odorous ham, and smoking mushrooms—as all these ministrants to the stomach's comfort on the Spawer's breakfast-table there are—but the Spawer only looks at them in staring disregard.
This last blow about Pam has struck him so suddenly and so forcefully that he can only keep feeling himself over, and wonder what bones are broken, and how many. His pride, he knows, has suffered a nasty shock. All along he has been reckoning upon the girl as though she were an actual possession, to be left or taken at his own sweet will; a fixed star in the firmament. ”

“ Father Mostyn awoke suddenly from his musing to the awareness of a strange presence, encompassing it with the meshes of an inquiring eye. Before the Spawer could extricate his glance from the toils of its inadvertent trespass, the dread "Ha!" had completed his enslavement and brought him up on his heel sideways at the moment of passing.
"... A stranger within our gates!" Father Mostyn observed, with courteous surprise, rocking ruminatively to and fro on his legs in the roadway, and dangling the ebony staff in both palms. He drew a comprehensive circle with its ferrule in the blue sky. ”

“ The warmth of a woman's body is an enervating atmosphere to the moral fibres of a man when that body is the object of his renunciation, and his fibres are slackened to start with. And the proud illumination about the girl's eyes as she went forward at his instigation was like the high, bright blaze of a lighthouse for holding him prisoner to its beacon against all the futile beating of his wings.
Through the tarred gate and under the trailing flames of nasturtium Pam led him into the cottage of the dying man. It was a kitchen living-room they stepped into. ”

“ He saw, in a flash, as though his spiritual eyes had been opened, the true pathos of the picture: the dying man, seated so motionless in his chair, with his faded blue eyes gazing into Heaven through the blind; the worn woman, the better portion of whose years and loving energy the man was taking to the grave with him; the sweet, purifying sunlight bathing the world outside; the girl with the lips of celestial compassion, drawing old truths from the battered and thumb-marked Bible, distilling them anew in pure liquid sound, and dropping them so coolingly into the overheated kitchen of death. ”

“ But Pam was hands and eyes, and feet and lips, and thinker for them both.
Emma Morland brought the letters round in these early days, but Pam opened them, at the Spawer's express bidding, and read them to him aloud in her musical fluty voice—the voice that had won her a place in his heart before even he had set eyes upon her. And as she read, the Spawer, sitting in the big chair by the open sunlit window, with cushions under him of Pam's placing, would explain to her the various allusions; let her into his life; throw open all its gateways to the girl. ”

“ But the taste for life, once awakened, cannot be so inanimately surrendered. Cost what cost in pain, lips will keep returning periodically to the cup—each time with further strength of fortitude for pain—till in the end hands are strong to grasp and retain, and life, sipped at first, is gulped with eager mouthfuls. And so, slowly but surely, the Spawer returned again and again to his multitude of hurting things, and looked upon them diligently, and patiently learned their shape, and studied them, and knew them in the end for moons. ”

“ From her fingers when they touched him; from her lips when they rested on him; from her attitude when she turned towards him—flowed this constant current of love, love, love. Like a very planet was the life of Maurice Ethelbert Wynne in these days—a luminous orb swimming in pure ether of love. The love of a true, good woman is great and wonderful, but the love of this girl was so great and so wonderful that in the strong tide of it the Spawer lay half incredulous on his bed and blinked. ”

“ He would be building up a new life for himself; a new habitation for his soul to live in, out of new interests, out of new ambitions (if he had any) , out of new environments.
Last of all, out of the mass of arguments and sub-arguments, questions and cross-questions, considerations and counter-considerations, in one of those sudden lucid heavenly flashes of righteousness with which the soul's lightning has power to pierce, at irregular and unexpected intervals, the cloud of doubt, he received the inspiration of resolve. Departure, the Spawer decided, was the only thing to save him. ”

“ The sound of the massive latch resounding acutely through the empty building a second time puts a death-like stop to the chancel activity, and an august step heard passing over the flagstones in lonely majesty of silence announces beyond all doubt that his Reverence has arrived. At the same moment the Spawer, with a strange, nervous fluttering about his heart—as though he were about to face some great audience in his musical capacity—hears the whispering echo of light footsteps going up the winding stairs of stone from the door in the porch to the organ loft. ”

“ The day was full of terrors for her; the morning meeting with Emma and with the schoolmaster; the facing of her uncle and her aunt; their solicitude about a headache that had never been. More Ullbrig hypocrisy to wade through; more shame of lying and untruth.
From her bed she rose at length, a soulful picture of trouble; replaced the fallen pillow and drew up the blind. An echo of its sound of cord and creaking roller reached her faintly from elsewhere, with a muffled cough, and telling her that her own activity was being duplicated by the ever-vigilant shadow, struck pain across her mouth. ”

“ He was merely a musician, he told himself, using destiny as his fiddle, tuning the strings of circumstance to the tune needed of him. So, catching sight of the little despicable harmonium for the hundredth time, with the suddenly sparkling eye for a revelation, "What," said he, in accents of surprised pleasure that even deceived Pam— (though he dared not have thought it) —"a harmonium?"
The old woman whipped off its meagre tippet of oilcloth in a twinkling, and displayed its poor double octave of discolored celluloid with a toothless smile of proud possession. ”

“ Father Mostyn told her suavely, "so far as that goes."
"Is n't there?" asked Pam; and then quickly: "... Of course, I did n't think there would be. Why should there?"
"Ha! Pam, Pam, Pam!" said his Reverence, raising his hand from the counter, and wagging a monitory loose forefinger at her. "All the doctrine of Church Catholic can't drive the first woman out of you quite, I fear. Curiosity in that little breast of yours is a blackbird in a linnet's cage, and may break away through the bars."
Pam looked up from her pot-hooks sideways and laughed the soft, musical confession of guilt. ”

“ And last of all, the sounds of bolts shot beneath; journeyings of Emma to and fro between the two kitchens. Now she would be extinguishing the lamp; now she would be lighting her candle; now she would be putting the kitchen lamp back for safety on the dresser by the wall; now she would be coming upstairs ... ah! here she came. The flickers of her candle winked momentarily in the keyhole of Pam's door, as though she were listening at the head of the staircase to gather assurance of her sound repose. Then the keyhole closed its blinking eye, and there ensued the click of Emma's own latch. ”

“ Would she ever forget the night of horror that saw the compact made. The lonely, dusty highroad to Hunmouth, with its wide grass borders sloping down to the ditch bottoms, between the trimmed, stunted hedgerows, where the schoolmaster led her; the rising moon; the sickly, suffocating mist of harvest; the dim stars. And there, backward and forward over the powdery road, she had fought that last fateful fight for her soul's freedom—and failed.
Give her the letter back ... only give her the letter back ... and she would try to love him in earnest. She would force herself to love him. ”

“ Ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."
When Pam said: "If it were not so ... I would have told you," one felt it must be so indeed. Such lips could never lie. And as the girl's clear voice rose and filled that little kitchen—so compassionate, so truthful, so natural—the full sublimity of the picture of a sudden swelled up in the Spawer's soul and mounted to his throat. ”

“ Once in her bedroom, the hardness fell off the girl's face as though it had been stucco; the hidden occupant came to her trembling lips, looked out of her eyes, gazed forth upon the outer world, as an escaped prisoner might, full of horror of his position, and dreading every moment the summons that should announce his discovery. But there were no tears this time. Tears are but the petty cash of woman's trouble account; the noisy silver and copper, which make a great jingle, are parted with and never missed. Pam's trouble was no longer in silver and copper, not in gold even. ”

“ It was a figure; the figure of a man; a man in white; a man in flannels—the Spawer.
All at once her dormant consciousness awoke with a start to his imminence, as though her eye had been giving no warning of his approach all this while. She turned round, and a great spreading sickness of guilt took hold of her. Her blood seemed rushing all ways, like an anthill in confusion. The hand with the letter dropped suddenly, as though it were a wounded wing. It was the right hand that held it now, and the bag was on her left side. Had he seen her? Could she pass it into the bag without notice. ”

“ The Spawer was going; this evil weaver of charms was under order of departure. Till then he would hold his tongue; bear with the surging of his love. When once this stumbling-block on the pathway to the girl's heart was removed he could renew his approaches—fill the void, even, that this stranger should leave in it.
"I was actuated ... only by desire for your happiness," he told Pam, after he had suffered her to weep awhile without interruption. "What I have said to you," he tugged at his collar, "has been said ... through love and for love." ”

“ If we turn them up again, we are merely looking for the rain to stop. Our lives are elemental and our pleasures few. To speak ill of one's neighbor, to slander the vicar, to deride the church, to perpetuate heresy, to pasture untruths—spargere voces in vulgum ambiguas—to fly off at a tangent on strong beer—these are among our catalogue of homely recreations.
"If you were staying here to study us for any length of time—but I suppose you are the mere sojourner of a day, gone from us again in the cool of the evening with the night-moths and other flitting things?"
The Spawer laughed lightly. ”

“ Her name met her a second time as she opened it, from a few steps further up the stairs, and more urgently uttered.
"Pam! ... Are ye there?"
Her mouth was dry; her lips felt cracked like crust; her tongue a piece of red flannel, but her voice might have been less unsteady—as it might also have been louder—when she answered.
"I 'm here," she said, and with an effort to divert suspicion and appear unconcerned; "... do you want me, Emma?"
A guilty person would never ask: "... do you want me?" A guilty person would know too well, and not dare to risk the question. Don't you understand? ”

“ Where the roadway splits on the trim, green prow of Hesketh's high garden-hedge, dipping down like the trough of a wave and sliding along the cool, moss-grown wall beneath a tangle of leafy rigging towards the sunlit opens of Cliff Wrangham, Father Mostyn, deep in his own thoughts, came suddenly upon the Spawer, going homeward.
He was a tall, lithe figure of young manhood, in snowy holland, with the idle bearing of one whose activity is all in the upper story; eyes brown, steadfast, and kindly, less for the faculty of seeing things than of thinking them ”

“ At the far end, in a corner by the window, is an aged piano—more aged than any the Spawer has ever come across, he thinks. He gives an exclamation of amused greeting when his eyes first fall upon it, and throwing up the lid, shakes hands with it most affably. Probably it has never known respectability since the hour of its birth—or at least since it went into the world from the factory. It has been a pot-house creature—changing from pot-house to pot-house, from vaults to cosy, from cosy to smoke-room, and from smoke-room to private bar—until its landing here from Hunmouth three years ago. ”

“ For the events of last night were a too inviting vintage to be left uncorked and untasted, and out of this glowing wine of remembrance he attempted to win back the girl's face, and did not altogether succeed. He reclaimed certain shifting impressions of red lips exaggeratedly curled; of great round eyes; of multiplied freckles about the brows and nose; of a startling white throat beyond where the sun had dominion; of a shabby blue Tam-o'-Shanter and a perfect midnight of hair—but all of them seen grotesquely, as it might be at the bottom of the cup, with himself blowing on the wine. ”

“ Father Mostyn took his place at the head, in the ecclesiastical high-backed arm-chair of oak, facing the beef and the window, with the big buck-horn hafted carving-knife to his right hand and the carving fork to his left for insignia of office, each of them rearing its nose over a monstrous cut-glass rest, shaped like a four-pound dumbbell. Pam sat on his left. And the Spawer sat exactly in front of Pam on the other side of the table; whenever they raised their eyes they were looking at each other. ”

“ For a short space the Spawer and Pam walked along in silence, but sharing the same thought, as though they made joint use of an umbrella. The stillness of a great Sunday had fallen over them; like communicants of the Blessed Sacrament of Charity, they walked away a little hushed, each treasuring the remembrance of the other's goodness; each trying to retain undissipated those elusive sky-colors of exaltation that at length must melt and fade away, however carefully cherished, into the dull grey of daily life. ”

“ From the far fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again their strange, cutting, human cough. Came, as the Spawer listened, the slow, muffled thud-thud of some horse's hoofs on the turf, as it plodded in patient change of pasture, and the deep blowing of kine along the hedge-bottoms. ”

“ Truly, many waters cannot quench love.
Sunday—that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday, that seemed like the climax of the girl's shame, when to her horror she had found the Spawer in his pew beneath her; bless Heaven for the timely storm that kept them apart—Sunday came and went.
Monday replaced it; a promiseful, rainless day. All the sky was heaped up with great broken masses of cloud from yesterday's storm, that a persistent warm breeze swept over the cliff edge and across the sea, in ceaseless waves of sunlight and shadow. ”

“ She allotted the last letter, and pushed James Maskill's budget towards him across the counter with a heroic smile, enough to make his eyes water. It was the smile such as a dying martyr might bequeath to those she loved, and by whom she had been loved. All was death and the coldness of it underneath, but at times like these death, coming from within, drives out the soul from its earthly tenement, and as it lingers on the threshold of the flesh before departing, the flesh is glorified. Many smiles had Pam given the postman in his time ... ”