ly risen; as it shone on the
mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a
vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges.
In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features
clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that
they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had
never seen such calmness. And the calmness was not alone in her
expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms
and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared
to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her
far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that
her sympathy could not encompass--nothing that he need be ashamed to
tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by
reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had
attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was
filled with a strange sense of gratitude.

Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.

"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be
afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for
me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one--not
even you--has the power to do that."

VIII

He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."

A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth?
You yourself tell the truth---- When they say that I never cry, they
mean that I never let them see me."

He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man.
Not to cry at all would be monstrous; it was that which made me afraid
of you. A man doesn't like a woman to be stronger than himself. It was
about a man who didn't like a woman to be stronger than himself that I
came to talk to you."

She had guessed. Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her
life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of
the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the night
without.

Her lips scarcely moved. "And the man?"

"Your husband."

"But he's dead."

"I know."

He waited for her to flame up at the indelicacy of his intrusion. He
almost hoped she would. When she sat motionless as a statue, he
continued apologetically. "I'm trespassing on things sacred. Because of
that I've foug