On the Eve of the Regatta.

(They reach the stile.)

He.Let me help you over.

She.I don't need any help. Women can climb stiles as well as men.

He(turning away). Of course.

She(amazed because he does not insist). I wish you hadn't come. I wouldn't have asked you to pick poppies for me if——

He(interrupting). I came as your escort—nothing more.

She.I don't require any escort. You can go home by the road.

(His face falls. The roads are hot and dusty, and the fields green and fragrant. Besides this, he has curved his spine flower gathering for two hours in the hope of gratifying her.)

He.You will not send me off like this? Lilla, darling, don't let us quarrel about trifles.

She.Woman's independence is not a trifle.

He(laughing). Of course not.

(The laugh is fatal.)

She(indignantly). Good-bye!

He.What do you mean? I am coming with you.

She.Never!

He (looking at her askance). Lilla!

She.I mean it.

He.And your decision——

She.Is irrevocable!

(Her foot is on the step of the stile. Her right hand holds the poppies and supports the open sunshade which rests on her shoulder. She turns her back on him.)

He(in a huff). Oh, very well.

(He commences walking towards the road gate. She half mounts the stile, looks across the field, then pauses. He, some yards off, is fumbling with the chain of the gate.)

She(after making another movement towards the field and then shrinking back). Frank!

(He does not hear.)

She(louder). Frank!

He(not moving). Yes.

She.Come here.

(He obeys. She remains seated on the top rung of the stile.)

She.Frank!

He(by the side of her). Well?

She(in rather an anxious voice, and pointing across the field). What's that?

He.A bull.

She.Oh!

He.Well?

She.Frank, are you sure you didn't mean to laugh at me?

He.Quite sure.

She.You apologise?

He.As much as you like.

She.And you'll never oppose woman's independence?

He.Never!

She.Then you may carry my poppies for me.

He.And come home with you?

She.If you promise not to tease.

He(leaping over the stile). I promise.

She(following leisurely and glancing warily across the field). And, Frank, dear, hadn't you better cover the poppies with your handkerchief——

He.Why?

She.Oh, because—isn't it rather glary in the field? They might fade, you know.

"'Why dost thou look so pale, my love?''I hear the raven, not the dove,And for the marriage peal, a knell.'"

"A year to-morrow since our wedding day."

He lounged opposite to her in a Canadian canoe, now talking, now soliloquising. Her eyes were closed, the fine pallor of her face, the steely lights of her dusky hair showed contrastingly against cushions of amber silk which propped her head. Grey was the background and green—grey with falling gauzes of twilight, green with luxuriance of leafage in its emerald prime.

They had paddled to Shiplake at set of sun, starting from their house-boat, moored in Henley Reach, to return through the shady backwater, which coiled like a slumberous silver snake through the heart of a mossy lane. Here they lingered under a languishing tree—a very Narcissus pining over its own image in the water, and shedding subtle resinous odours of gum and sap upon themellow air—determined to enjoy Nature in mood of most infinite peace. Time passed unheeded, and silence, the euphonious silence of dual solitude, was only broken by the casual twang of lute strings, or the sudden enunciation of a half-modelled thought.

"A year to-morrow since our wedding day." His voice thrilled with love and tenderness, its tone caressed her ears, though her eyes remained closed.

"You have been happy, dearest?" he said, leaning forward and clasping one of her warm, white hands.

"Very happy."

"And had all you anticipated?"

"All—more," she breathed, with opening eyelids, "you have been very good, very generous to me."

"Good? Can selfishness be mistaken for goodness? You said you loved fine dresses, it became my pleasure to choose you the finest in the world—you longed for jewels, and it was my pride to search for gems to match your beauty."

"I was very greedy—too greedy. I care less for such things now. Poverty makes oneworldly, selfish, mercenary; don't you think so? I was so poor!—the very rustle of silk was music to my ears, and the lustre of precious stones seemed to conjure majesty and beauty in a flash."

"And now you have nothing left to long for?" He bent over her hand and kissed it, and the little canoe, like a fairy cockle, began suddenly to shake and dip in the swell of an unusual tide.

"Nothing, dear," she answered him, while her eye scanned the waves that had so strangely ruffled their nook. "I wonder if some launch is passing to swell the river so?"

"Scarcely; that bend in the creek would save the wash from reaching us."

"But the water is agitated; look! it seems as though a high wind were raking the face of it." She gazed curiously up, and then down the backwater.

The trees were swaying with a soft unheard whisper of wind, and in the deepest shadow companies of gnats were playing hide-and-seek with each other. No sound but the hum of insect life reached them.

"It is strange," she went on, stretching herhand to the quaking water and withdrawing suddenly from the chill touch of it, "very strange; it looks as though the sleeping river had suddenly awoken."

"Dear little pottle of whims"—so he had christened her—"what new romance will she weave?"

"Oh, there is nothing romantic about that. If it were grass, the 'uncut hair of graves,' it would be different."

"Different! Is grass portentous? churchyard grass especially?"

"Every green blade of the earth must be 'churchyard grass' as you call it. It all springs up from life that was." She plucked a tuft from the bank as she spoke, and laid its moist blades in her lap.

"Then where's the omen?

"A silly one—an old Teutonic superstition. They believe that if the second husband of a woman treads the grave of the first, the grass will wave till the corpse awakes from its rest."

At this he chuckled joyously, her voice was so appropriately tragic.

"But here we've no second husbands,and no tombs; only a fanciful little wife who has burst the bonds of the matter of fact."

"Was I so prosaic?" She stared at the dancing gnats and flicked at them dreamily with her glove. "Ah, perhaps so—in the days when the pinch of penury forced one to be tough and calculating. You could not imagine, Harry, the fret of blue blood in starved veins. To be poor makes one mean, grasping, heartless; once rich, we can become amiable, virtuous, heroic even."

"And poetic, eh?" he said, flushing at the recollection of transformations that his love and his wealth had wrought for Cinderella. "Come, we must not forget the Lowthers' dinner, we're due there now."

With this he paddled out from their retreat, carefully—for the dusk was closing round them—into the open river.

All along the banks a misty vapour, rising from the earth, twisted and wreathed till it wrapped the tow-path in gloom. Deep shadows stretched their quaint deformities fantastically across the wave, mingling deceitfully with black clumps of tall reeds, intowhich the canoe occasionally glided with a dangerous swish.

The distance from the backwater to the Reach was fortunately short. Coloured lights from the numerous house-boats that were gathered in line to view the morrow's regatta guided them, and from the merry laughter which assailed their ears they learnt the geographical position of Sir Eustace Lowther's floating fairyland, styled ironically "The Raft."

"We're famishing," roared someone from its balcony.

"So are we," came in duet from the canoe.

"Take care of the ice-box," called another voice from the gloom, as a paddle hit some obstacle in the darkness.

"Fiz cooling," explained a guest, appreciatingly. "Your hand?"

Lady Rolleston gave it, and was escorted up the steps to the feasting place.

It was set out with a studied view to polite vagabondage. Deftly manœuvred forks, two-pronged twigs mounted in silver, and clasp knives with chased and monogrammed handles, garden lanterns in frames of fretted iron, osier baskets bursting with anincongruous burden of river flowers and hot-house fruits, champagne in old Bohemian mugs, ices to be dug from crystal troughs with silver trowels, all these heterodoxies accentuated the bizarrerie which made "The Raft" such an unique and enviable lounging place.

Among the guests were three painters, a peer, a novelist, an actress of note, and one or two women whose beauty was, if not classical, at least effervescent and exhilarating. Merry talk prevailed as a matter of course, and bets were freely exchanged on the prospects of the crews.

"I hope to-morrow won't be a pelting day like last year; it was ghastly," said one of the belles to Sir Henry Rolleston.

"I didn't find it ghastly," he chuckled; "but then I wasn't at Henley. It was my wedding day."

"Lucky is the bridegroom that the rain rains on seems to be your version of the proverb," chirruped his companion.

"We've been lucky enough, sun or no sun," he said, looking across at his wife, whose lovely face wore a decidedly bored expression.

She was being worried by the peer, who,on the "if-you-want-a-thing-well-done-do-it-yourself" principle, was vaunting his own attitude towards the agricultural question.

"I never had such a wretched time," went on the beauty, "we were moored higher up last year, by the island, near where you are now. But it wasn't all the rain, it was poor Kelly's accident—you knew him, Basil Kelly? Drowned, poor fellow, in the dark—canoe washed ashore in the morning."

"Hush," exclaimed Sir Harry, looking across the table and lowering his voice. "I never knew the poor fellow, but my wife did; they were boy and girl chums for years. He was master at the Grammar School near her, and a capital oar."

"That's what I couldn't make out. Did you see what the papers said?"

"The papers were purposely kept from us. It was too deplorable a subject to be mooted on our wedding day."

"Did she ever know?"

"Yes, later, and bore it very well. She was indignant at the suggestion of suicide, but has never alluded to the subject since."

"Harry," called Lady Rolleston from theopposite side, "Sir Eustace wants to know why you moored so far up?"

"Oh," he replied, "partly because I was a bit late and partly because we're best out of the thick of it. I enjoy seeing the start almost as much as the finish."

"We have the Club grounds to go to if we like," explained Lady Rolleston, as they mounted to the balcony where the thrumming of guitars had already commenced.

All the racing visitors were gathered in knots in the blue darkness; companies of performers, niggers, German bands, and banjoists were skimming along from house-boat to house-boat, making music to the guests and indulging in mild badinage with each other. The moon peered out from the heavens through a silvery haze, and one by one the timorous blinking stars grew more audaciously golden as the night became darker.

On "The Raft" most of the company disposed themselves in groups, and boisterously chorused the musical sentiments of a young man who had boarded the boat to recite of love-making on modern methods. LadyRolleston, exhausted from the fatigue of entertaining the indefatigable agriculturist, sat somewhat apart on a long cane chair. She fanned herself, and from time to time applauded. It was a pleasure to contemplate the boyish zest with which her husband led the roar. Song after song followed, and then came a "breakdown" from a young "Middy," whose spirits were infectious. At last, when the rampage had almost ceased, Harry Rolleston became aware of his wife's silence and exceeding pallor.

"It's awfully late, we must be off, or we shall face daylight before we know where we are."

Jovial farewells were exchanged, parting bets quoted, then the pair descended into darkness.

The river was now almost deserted; its face like a black mirror giving forth only exaggerated reflections of such illuminations as still glowed along the length of the Reach. These, however, served well to steer by, and they neared their own house-boat with little difficulty. Outside, though the night was sultry, tiny breezes that came and went fannedthe skin like the breath of babes. Under the roof, however, not a whiff of air could penetrate, and, within the room, the atmosphere seemed hot and asphyxiating.

Maud Rolleston, as she threw off her gown, complained.

"The air here is stifling, I should like to sleep on deck."

"Impossible," her husband said, "you would have the sun routing you in an hour or two."

"Then we must keep the door open. I don't suppose there are burglars about."

"Burglars? I'd like to catch them—but damp—one can't fight that."

"It is too hot to be damp," she asserted, laying a hand on the frilled pillows of her tiny bunk.

"But dangerous mists rise up from the river," he argued, warningly.

"I am not afraid of mists," she said, and in her long silk bedgown she tripped to the outer door, opened it, and returned to fling herself in abandonment of fatigue upon her tiny couch.

As accompaniment to her slumbers the lapping of the tide against the house-boatsteps made a soft, incessant music, while the swishing of reeds by the river bank sighed a sweet response to the whispered endearments of the wind. On the air still floated drowsily the sound of strings from guitars, and the muffled echo of voices that sang in other house-boats farther down the stream. Then by degrees, within the space of an half-hour, came a greater hush—the hush of a sleeping world worn out with laughter and laziness.

And Maud Rolleston, dreaming, grew paler under the moonbeams that peered through the lace shroudings of the narrow window. She sighed sometimes in her sleep, now and again lifting her head upon an elbow, as though to look out on the expanse of water that purled almost silently to its inevitable future. Her eyes were open, expressionless, but tearful. In the crystal seemed a reflection of the water's suddenly ruffled surface which the moon was dappling with points of silver....

By and by she put her feet to the ground, hesitatingly at first, and then gliding throughthe open door, she stood on an old Moorish prayer-carpet that covered the head of the steps. Two nautilus shells holding their burden of giant mignonette shielded her from the air; but it broke at times fragrantly from the scented forest of blossoms.

With a lily in her hand, backgrounded thus by stars and midnight, she might have represented a virgin saint on a missal, but her arms were bare and extended, and she seemed rather to be a prophetess, a sybil, uttering invocation.

Her lips scarce moved, but they sighed a name, "Basil."

The ruffled waters, at the steps of the boat, swayed and parted. The visage of a dead man looked out from the depths to her. His hair hung lank about his brow, the tide washed it along in passing, as it washed the weeds from the face of the lilies.

"Basil," she murmured.

"You called to me? Or was it but the haunting of a name that once did melt like honey from your lip?"

"I called...."

"Was it the wail of love?—Ah no,perchance it was a sigh—the pitiful sigh of happiness compassionate—happiness regretting sorrow?..."

"It was love alone that cried."

"Searching?"

"And finding not!"

"But why doth love cry here—here by the wet tomb of dead men? what may it find where the waters slide and shift, and the fishes twist, and the reeds tangle?"

"Rest."

"Where satins shimmer not, and gems are few, save those bled from the heart of despair—frozen in flowing...."

"The rarest——"

"Where no song ever swells, and the dirge of the river pleads and pleads for the soul of faith murdered...."

"And saves it."

"Doth love come here to find rest that no earth could give, here, in the cradle of the weeds: to wear jewels, rarer than rubies of the crown, tears of passion, ice-bound and spurned? Doth it come to sing the river's anthem, to wash itself white and holy, and save its soul for ever?"

"It comes."

Close by among the rushes a wood pigeon stirred in its sleep and cooed, and the river at the foot of the house-boat step yawned like a bath of silver, pale and cold. Over the gulf swayed the warm, white body of a dreaming woman. Her arms were flung out, and a soft sob, sweeter than the dove's note, a sob of rest and rapture and realisation broke from her lips.

Far across the fields, the note of the chanticleer rang out; the gulf closed, the porch of the house-boat stood empty, and the moon and the stars paled at what they had seen. Then they hid their heads and wept in the dawn.

"'Twas only a dream—a boy's first passion,A foolish love, and a mock of bliss."

His first love; this is what his heart called her. But his head and a poignant memory offered many negations. There was, for instance, the girl who sold papers outside bounds, when fourteen-year-old effervescence converted a toast-and-water emotion into an intoxicating passion. And his best chum, Harry's sister, whom he had never seen, but whose photograph had lodged in his breast pocket—she, for a short time, had presided in that revolutionary area called his heart. He had the photograph still, with its central yellowy patches, which betrayed repeated collisions with an ardent nose above the place aimed at by his moustacheless lips. When the down began to grow like the feathers on a nestling bird, there had been someone else—a fairy all gauze and wings,a chameleon creature that changed her soft transparencies under the magic of limelight for a limited sum nightly during the pantomime season. Being somewhat of an idealist, his mind retained the fairy element in spite of rather harsh contradictions in the way of healthy appetite, indifferent pronunciation, and dubious finery. Of course he recovered the illusion, as he had recovered the measles, and, moreover, allowed his fancy a few other experimental flights before he encountered Carol Silver.

The introduction was made by Harry Burnley at the time when, let loose from Sandhurst, their movements hung on the voice of theGazette; it was made with reluctance, for Harry was well versed in his friend's inflammability, and had himself for Carol more than a brotherly regard. However, the day was Sunday, and opportunities for detaching himself from Tyndall being scarce, Harry could but pursue his customary route to the Silvers' house, accompanied by his friend and guest.

But Yate Tyndall was not thrust under fire without warning.

"She's an awfully nice girl," jerked his chum, as they crunched the gravelled drive to the house; "but it's no good fooling around in that quarter—everyone knows she's gone on Rosser, some say engaged, but I don't think it's come to that."

"What's he in?" questioned Yate, soldier-like believing that every man that is a man and not a vegetable must be "in" something.

"Oh, he's waiting for theGazetteas we are. He scraped in through the militia, as much to his own amazement as to everyone else's."

Yate's opinion of Miss Silver's suitor shrivelled.

He was himself a mightily clever youngster who had passed into Sandhurst straight from the schoolroom. Perhaps fate had favoured him in providing on the mother's side some German profundity and on the father's a sturdy vertebral column and proportionate wrappings of British muscle; perhaps it had not, for inside the profundity was a luxuriant growth of romance, and through the British muscle coursed subdued but dangerous fires.

"He's a good-looking chap," explainedHarry—for Rosser was an old friend—"a dashing rider, and a capital shot—everyone likes him."

"Lucky fellow," grunted Yate. "I've often observed that the failures are quite the most popular."

"Because it's their popularity that does for them." Harry, who had occupied a humble position on the nethermost hem of the Sandhurst list, was conscious that his own anxiety for cavalry was due rather to the "beggars can't be choosers" system of the idle and popular ones than to a direct equestrian penchant.

"And women pet them; they'd prefer a fool who can pot rabbits and do a barn-dance to Homer himself," growled Yate.

"I expect Homer in the flesh was a bit flabby," said Harry, contemplatively rubbing the knob of his stick over an immaculate chin. At this moment the door was opened, and they were invited to follow straight through the house to where the conservatory gave on to a rose garden; Miss Silver and her mother were there reading, said the maid.

From the top of the steps Yate caught apretty glimpse of Sabbath repose. The lawn and the standard roses were formal enough, but there were acacia trees on the left, and, under them, grouped artistically, an Indian drugget, a tea table, and long basket chairs. In one of these Carol lay curled up like the letter S, with head deep in a frilled cushion. Harry, from his point of vantage, whispered, "She reminds me of a lettuce." The soft green of a shimmering tea gown tipped with transparencies of lemon-tinted gauze was gratifying to parched eyes in over-ripe midsummer.

Yate frowned. He was not on friendly enough terms to appreciate a joke which might be overheard.

Harry proceeded to shout a jovial self-announcement, upon which she lifted her eyes from what seemed an absorbing theme.

Yate's quick glance, in the moment of introduction, observed the book was upside down. Her thoughts had evidently been fixed on something more intensely earnest still. Rosser, perhaps, he thought to himself—he had already begun to detest Rosser.

Her face brightened when she greetedthem, and she commenced talking with almost excited volubility.

"I'm so glad you've come."

Harry's expression widened to a grin; his mouth was one of those expansive ones which are born grinning. It sealed for him the reputation of good nature.

"Sunday in the suburbs is such a dull thing, one feels quite asphyxiated, even to the marrow," she said, addressing herself to Harry, and veering weathercock-wise in the direction of Tyndall.

"I thought ladies saved that day for gossip and scandal?" said Yate, dropping, after the fashion of male monsters, into the smallest of chairs indicated by her. Harry had appropriated a footstool, which brought his grasshopper outlines against the green of her gown, and was already resuming his customary pastime of sucking the knob of his walking stick, a survival of babyhood which was doubtless responsible for the awning-like upper lip wherein lurked his impressive joviality.

"Oh, so they do, but at this season of the year all the women wear their old bonnets andtheir faded summer gowns—they're not even worth abusing."

"Then you do enjoy a little vinegar?" volunteered Yate, with eyes that declared her all honey.

"No, it's too crude; but I like spice—just a pinch or two to leaven appreciation."

Mrs Silver at this moment loomed expansively in the distance. Harry leapt up to join her, and only the acacia leaves above were eavesdroppers to the rest of the conversation. It flowed evenly, sometimes stopping against an impedimental stone of argument—occasionally gushing with iridescent bubbles from the force of energetic collision. Yate was a serious thinker and a confident talker. Carol had by nature that light quality of intellectual exuberance which, ornamental and active as foam, has no kinship with real erudition. They were speaking of Yate's career, the first steps, the coveted Victoria Cross, the laurels, and a warm blush underlay the bronze of the young soldier's cheek.

"A year ago," she said, "I was rampant with your ambition, now I cannot forgetthat the rungs of a soldier's ladder are made of dead men."

"What are a few lives compared with a country's greatness?"

"Only a subtraction from a multiplicity of mourners whom death rejects, the numberless babes bereft, the women starved of love."

"Surely love were a petty consideration, a paralysis to the hand of——"

"Don't you remember what Byron says?" she uttered, her glance fastening itself on the floating mists of sunset, "'Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' If war costs him his life, it takes her whole existence too!"

"Yes, but—but—" stammered Yate, fighting with a wave of sentimentality deeper than any to which he had been accustomed, "women nowadays don't love in that way."

"The more fools they if they do," she answered, flippantly, coming abruptly from the clouds, and flicking at a gnat with the stem of her fan. "Have some tea, it is iced and flavoured with lemon peel,a la Russe."

"No tea, thanks. There is Burnley wavingat us. I think he has an engagement, and means me to be off."

"Not yet, surely. If you are not booked for anything you need not hurry."

"Thanks. I should be glad to stay. I say, Harry, there's no good dragging me to the Waymans, is there?"

"Besides," interposed Carol, as her mother approached, "he has not been introduced to mamma."

"I beg your pardon," said Burnley, posing himself with mock formality, "Mrs Silver, let me present to you my friend Yate Tyndall—he's poor but pleasant."

"The fact of poverty is an unpleasantness of itself," affirmed Yate, extending a hearty hand to Carol's mother.

The expression of the salutation was scarcely valedictory, and Harry Burnley found himself doomed to solitary departure.

There was—after the manner of suburban vogue—a tennis club in Weytown. To this theéliteof Weytown society, composedmostly of shelved officers in various degrees of dilapidation, and their growing families, belonged. Here the Burnleys and Silvers had met, from the years of teetotum to those of flirtation, and here, outside the cabalistically marked acre, in their search for truant tennis balls, had Carol and Rosser commenced the engagement which some said was serious, and others declared to be but a boy and girl pastime.

When the Burnleys' visitor, Yate Tyndall, appeared upon the scene, which he did almost immediately after his introduction to the Silvers, there was spoon diet for the gossips in plenty. Where Carol was, there the six feet two of the lumbering youth perambulated also; where she was not—and the colour of her caprices was changeable as the iridescence of soap-suds—there,pro tem., was the soldierly figure extinct.

Burnley laughed, then he chaffed, then he warned. Reminiscences of Rosser were flaunted, dabbed forth like blisters, their unpleasantness being excused by their curative intent; but to no avail. Then Harry, never tolerant of home tattle, suddenly lent himselfas its mouthpiece. Carol was a flirt—nay, more; Rosser, her childhood's one chum, her girlhood's sweetheart, had been but two months absent, and she had picked up with, to her, the merest stranger, etc. etc. Harry further hinted at spiderly instincts, and hummed, "Will you walk into my parlour" somewhat portentously. The fact was that there was slight abrasion of his own heart's surface, but that he overlooked to view himself heroically, as most of us do, and believed his animus was purely in the interest of his friend. But the friend rejected salvation—flouted it—and in a few days the subject was emphatically—Yate could be repulsively emphatic when roused—closed between them.

On the tennis ground Carol and her new admirer made an almost daily group. They seldom played, but they wore flannels in compliment to the surroundings, and dallied with time in talking what one, at least, of them believed to be philosophy. But, as before said, Carol's moods were never stationary. She had a mischievous wit and an effervescent, infectious sprightliness about her—it was a constitutionalcharacteristic rather than the immediate outcome of gaiety. This made acquaintances consider her one of the happiest girls in the world. But of late her friends were prone to notice a suspicious drowsy pinkness of the eyelids, a sad pucker of the lip corners which argued complexly with the gusts of exuberance that followed any fit of pre-occupation. And Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other moods still—ugly ones—had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very early age—poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. To him she was the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar, a sign for wonderment and awe and dumb prostration, a problem too sublime for solution, though the key to many exalted enigmas lay, alas! merely with Rosser.

Of this Yate suspected a little—a very little. He never fully knew—nor indeed did she—how far the man was responsible for the development of the ineradicable events which crowded that autumn-tinted period. Once he spoke of him. It was when they had rambled from the tennis regions to where the edge of an adjacent common was banked with trees and dotted with seats arabesqued with initials by the playful penknives of holiday hordes. She had been capricious all day—moody, petulant—snappish, in vulgar phrase.

"Won't you tell me what bothers you?" he said, addressing the coil of her hair, for her face was bent to some hieroglyphics traced by her sunshade in the sandy ground.

"You!" she blurted.

"Shall I go?" he asked, meekly. "I've offered to do so often if it would make you happier."

"It wouldn't—nothing would make me happier."

"Why are you miserable?"

"I'm not," she muttered, and a heavy tear fell with a thud on the back of her glove.

He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed away the drop before it had time to sink in.

"Would it make you glad to know that if this were poison I would take it, to share even so much of you?"

"Itispoison, rank, acid poison, straight out of my wicked heart——"

"Then empty it; let me drain it, that there may be room for nothing but love."

"Love is a vaster emptiness—it is only a shadow thrown by ourselves."

"You have proved it so?" he questioned, anxiously. "You have loved?"

"I have loved," she breathed, with a weary accent on the middle word.

There was a long pause while they looked intently into the evening mists, which were weaving themselves into a veil of purple tissue over the horizon. A horrible tremor had seized him, and his next words, when they found voice, came thickly out from the burial place of a sob.

"Was it—was it Rosser?"

She merely bowed her head without looking at him.

He rose mutely, stretched his arms to right and left, drew himself to full length like some huge dog wakened from slumber, then for some moments he stood with hands clenched on his stick before he spoke.

"I suppose it must be 'good-bye.'"...

She looked at him dreamily.

"Need it?"

He leapt to her side.

"Do you mean that you do not want me to go—that you would rather I stayed?"

"Much rather."

"And he?"

"He has ceased to exist for me!"

A torrent of hot blood seemed to burst from Yate's frozen brain, as watershoots from the glaciers in summer.

"God! have you given him up?"

"I made a misstatement. I should have saidI have ceased to exist for him."

"That means that you love him?"

She faced round angrily.

"How dare you suggest such things of me? Do you think that women like I are made the same as slippers, to wait till footsore wanderers have need of them? Do you imagine I wouldwaste an eyelash in weeping for milk wantonly spilt?"

"Yet you cried?" he ventured, very softly.

"I cried from desolation. Can't you understand the loss of the illusion being more lamentable even than the loss of the reality? Come, let us go back," she added, "it is growing dark."

They wandered homewards lingeringly. The summer dusk was full of sweet mystery, of hazy, promising indefinitude; the heath led to the high road, and from thence they came under the darkness of trees, copper-beech and acacia trees, which made a fringed avenue along the back of the Silvers' orchard.

They halted as they reached the wicket. Each longed to express something, but the something was in so many volumes they could not decide whence to light on their quotation. At last she said:—

"I feel you are good and loyal and true. I wish I were worthy you."

He took her hand in his wide palms and smiled.

"Don't flatter me—if flattery it can be called. I question whether saintliness inbroadcloth is lovable; but I appreciate the compliment the more for its being undeserved."

"Boy, you are frivolous; if you weren't so good I should not have qualms about——"

"Do you know," he interposed abruptly, "how the Orientals prostrate themselves before their divinity? I would do more."

He flung himself on the ground at her feet, his forehead against the earth, and with a quick touch placed his head beneath her heel.

She uttered a sharp cry and stooped to him—to lift him. Had it been Rosser's, she thought, the act would have loomed magnificent; as it was, the combined self-abasement—the devotion, the allegiance of it—was crude and colourless. For her there were no passionate illuminations to preserve the margin of the sublime. She had argued love to be but the shadow cast by ourselves, and at that moment her soul's lamp lighted only conceptions that were blurred, formless, and grotesque.

But as he rose he caught her in his arms, and she did not resist them. She lay inert, like a wounded animal after long strife, and pleaded as though for physical or mental refuge.

"Make me love you! Make me love you!"

And so he kissed her.

It was a kiss that might have awakened a statue to tenderness. The wine of her lips, as he pressed and bruised and crushed them, intoxicated him. He forgot Rosser.

The next day a stone Galatea faced the mirror. There was a purple stain upon her mouth—a tiny swelling that would not disappear. It was scarcely perceptible, but it burnt brand-like on her heart; it glared at, and mocked her, and seemed to beckon with horrible witch-like fingers along the grimy gutters that fringe the paved paths to despair.

Loveless surrender! What more unredeemed debasement! Yet she would have vowed her being to lifelong slavery for Gordon Rosser's sake, and held such sacrifice but glorification. One kiss! What was it? Was it gold or was it mud? Mud, mud, mud, which only the magic of love's alchemy could transmute to gold and pearl. Yet the mud had served its purpose. Was it not sufficientto defile the temple that had been consecrated to an unworthy idol, break down its altars, obliterate all memory of misguided worship—child-like, unreasoning faiths?

But her revenge—her curse on the falsity had come home to roost. It not only branded her—it seared the innocent! Poor, poor Yate! What had he done that a suffering girl should have clung to him to avert mental death in an ocean of despond, while he had imagined it but a dancing duet on the waves of love? And she had aided the deception. It had been to gain time, to kill regret, to help in wrenching the weeds she had mistaken for flowers from the garden of her life. Well, she had failed, and the travesty must cease. But before it ceased that which she had striven to do as a duty to herself she would now do as a duty to Yate. She chose paper and a pen with deliberation, and wrote very proportionately and legibly:—

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