the hill? " said Sir
Richmond.

"Yes," she agreed, "up the hill."

Followed a silence.

Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and disconnected
talk about Tintern Abbey, concerning, which she had no history ready,
and then, still lamer, about whether Monmouthshire is in England
or Wales, silence fell again. The silence lengthened, assumed a
significance, a dignity that no common words might break.

Then Sir Richmond spoke. "I love, you," he said, "with all my heart."

Her soft voice came back after a stillness. "I love you," she said,
"with all myself."

"I had long ceased to hope," said Sir Richmond, "that I should ever find
a friend... a lover... perfect companionship...."

They went on walking side by side, without touching each other or
turning to each other.

"All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive in me," she
said....

"Cool and sweet," said Sir Richmond. "Such happiness as I could not have
imagined."

The light of a silent bicycle appeared above them up the hill and swept
down upon them, lit their two still faces brightly and passed.

"My dear," she whispered in the darkness between the high hedges.

They stopped short and stood quite still, trembling. He saw her face,
dim and tender, looking up to his.

Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had desired in
his dream....

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat explanations
of why she had not followed them, and enlarged upon the moonlight effect
of the Abbey ruins from the inn lawn. But the scared congratulations
in her eyes betrayed her recognition that momentous things had happened
between the two.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

FULL MOON

Section 1

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of having found
such happiness as he could not have imagined. But when he awoke in the
night that happiness had evaporated. He awoke suddenly out of this love
dream that had lasted now for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of
astonishment and dismay.

He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had parted also
from that process of self-exploration that they had started together,
but now he awakened to find it established and in full activity in his
mind. Something or someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an
abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he thought he was
doing with Miss Grammont and whither he thought he was taking