Gerda was the first to go to sleep that night as they lay side by side, with the familiar odours of summer grass and pigsty drainage floating in upon them. Wolf had arrived, not without many mental adjustments, during the last two months, at a more or less satisfactory compromise between what he felt for this girl, thus lying with his arm stretched out beneath her, and what he felt for the other one. Christie’s inflexible pride and the faint, hardly-stirred pulse of her subnormal senses, made it much easier for him. An instinctive unwillingness, too, in his own nature, to introduce any strain of harsh idealism, led him to get all the contentment he could out of his life with his lovely bedfellow. As he listened to her evenly-drawn breathing, and felt, through all his nerves, the delicious relaxation of her love-exhausted limbs, he was conscious now more than ever that it was completely unthinkable that he should be guilty of making her unhappy by any drastic change. In a sense what he had said to Selena Gault was true. He was