“Not return?”

“No; I have already resigned the curacy.  I believe your uncle has appointed to it the man whom Campbell found for me:  and an excellent man, I hear, he is.  At least, he will do better there than I.”

“But what could have induced you?  How sorry all the people will be!”

“I am not sure of that,” said he with a smile.  “I did what I could at last to win back at least their respect, and to leave at least not hatred behind me:  but I am unfit for them.  I did not understand them.  I meant—­no matter what I meant? but I failed.  God forgive me!  I shall now go somewhere where I shall have simpler work to do, where I shall at least have a chance of practising the lesson which I learnt there.  I learnt it all, strange to say, from the two people in the parish from whom I expected to learn least.”

“Whom do you mean?”

“The doctor and the schoolmistress.”

“Why from them less than from any in the parish?  She so good, and he so clever?”

“That I shall never tell to any one now.  Suffice it that I was mistaken.”

Valencia could obtain no further answer; and so the days ran on, every one becoming more and more intimate, till a certain afternoon, on which they were all to go and pic-nic, under Claude’s pilotage, above the lake of Gwynnant.  Scoutbush was to have been with them; but a heavy day’s rain in the meanwhile swelled the streams into fishing order, so the little man ordered a car, and started at three in the morning for Bettws with Mr. Bowie, who, however loth to give up the arrangement of plates and the extraction of champagne corks, considered his presence by the river-side a natural necessity.

“My dear Miss Clara, ye see, there’ll be nobody to see that his lordship pits on dry stockings; and he’s always getting over the tops of his water-boots, being young and daft, as we’ve all been, and no offence to you; and to tell you truth, I can stand all temptations—­in moderation, that is, save an’ except the chance o’ cleiking a fish.”

CHAPTER XX.

BOTH SIDES OF THE MOON AT ONCE.

The spot which Claude had chosen for the pic-nic was on one of the lower spurs of that great mountain of The Maiden’s Peak, which bounds the vale of Gwynnant to the south.  Above, a wilderness of gnarled volcanic dykes, and purple heather ledges; below, broken into glens, in which still linger pale green ashwoods, relics of that great primaeval forest in which, in Bess’s days, great Leicester used to rouse the hart with hound and horn.