ore understanding; more and
more forgiving, where understanding faltered, where gaps came--on
account of Lance, and of pain that went too deep for words. She had
endured her own share of that. She knew....

When all had been said, it was she who could not speak; and he gathered
her to him, kissing with a passion of tenderness her wet lashes, her
trembling lips----

At last: "Beloved--_has_ the blank space gone?" he asked. "Are you
content now?"

"Content! I'm lifted to the skies."

"To the tipmost top of them?" he queried in her ear; and mutely she
clung to him, returning his kisses, with the confidence of a child, with
the intensity of a woman....

* * * * *

All too soon it was over--their one mere day: the walk back through the
wood--never more enchanted than on a night of full moon: Tara, dropped
from the skies, lost to everything but the sound of Roy's voice in the
darkness, deep and soft, like the voice of her own heart heard in a
dream. It seemed incredible that there would be to-morrow--and
to-morrow--and to-morrow, world without end....

Back in the garden, Jeffers--a miracle of tact--wandered away to commune
with an idea, leaving father and son alone together.

Sir Nevil offered Roy a cigarette, and they sat down in two of the six
empty chairs near the beeches and smoked steadily without exchanging a
remark.

But this time they were thinking of one woman. For at parting Tara had
said again, "It's all been her doing--first and last." And Roy--with
every faculty sensitised to catch ethereal vibrations above and below
the human octave--divined that identical thought in his father's
silence. Her doing indeed! None of them--not even his father--knew it
better than himself.

And now, while he sat there utterly still in the midst of stillness--no
stir in the tree-tops, no movement anywhere but the restless glow of
Broome's cigar--the inexpressible sense of her stole in upon him,
flooding his spirit like a distillation from the summer night. Moment by
moment the impression deepened and glowed within him. Never, since that
morning at Chitor, had it so uplifted and fulfilled him....

Surely, now, his father could feel it too? Deliberately he set himself
to transmit, if might be, the thrill of her nearness--the intimacy, the
intensity of it.

Then, craving certainty, he put out a hand and touched his father's
knee.

"Dad," the word was a mere breath. "Can you feel...? She