In the end a motive simpler than love or jealousy decided the point. He took the shorter way, the way by Mr. Torp’s yard, because of a secret craving for food in the recesses of his stomach. But though this was his real motive, what he thought was his motive was jealousy over Bob Weevil. And the idea of this, that he should have such a feeling at all, in connection with the romance of passing close to Christie’s room, at once puzzled and shamed him.

He walked on with rapid strides now; and as he passed the familiar Torp yard, which lay in a hushed and rather ghastly pool of twilight, he thought how little he had foreseen, that March day when he turned into this enclosure, what occurrences would be the result of it! Bound by intimate habit to the one he had married⁠—in love, for good and all, with the one he had not married⁠—his situation just then was sufficiently complicated, without all this bewildering turmoil of personalities in King’s Barton!