if it were dark down there, it was dark, too,
above the water; and hearts ached, and eyes just as much searched for
that which did not come.

To watch it always flowing by to the sea; never looking back, never
swaying this way or that; drifting along, quiet as Fate--dark, or
glamorous with the gold and moonlight of these beautiful days and nights,
when every flower in her garden, in the fields, and along the river
banks, was full of sweet life; when dog-roses starred the lanes, and in
the wood the bracken was nearly a foot high.

She was not alone there, though she would much rather have been; two days
after she left London her Uncle and Aunt had joined her. It was from
Cramier they had received their invitation. He himself had not yet been
down.

Every night, having parted from Mrs. Ercott and gone up the wide shallow
stairs to her room, she would sit down at the window to write to Lennan,
one candle beside her--one pale flame for comrade, as it might be his
spirit. Every evening she poured out to him her thoughts, and ended
always: "Have patience!" She was still waiting for courage to pass that
dark hedge of impalpable doubts and fears and scruples, of a dread that
she could not make articulate even to herself. Having finished, she
would lean out into the night. The Colonel, his black figure cloaked
against the dew, would be pacing up and down the lawn, with his
good-night cigar, whose fiery spark she could just discern; and, beyond,
her ghostly dove-house; and, beyond, the river--flowing. Then she would
clasp herself close--afraid to stretch out her arms, lest she should be
seen.

Each morning she rose early, dressed, and slipped away to the village to
post her letter. From the woods across the river wild pigeons would be
calling--as though Love itself pleaded with her afresh each day. She was
back well before breakfast, to go up to her room and come down again as
if for the first time. The Colonel, meeting her on the stairs, or in the
hall, would say: "Ah, my dear! just beaten you! Slept well?" And, while
her lips touched his cheek, slanted at the proper angle for uncles, he
never dreamed that she had been three miles already through the dew.

Now that she was in the throes of an indecision, whose ending, one way or
the other, must be so tremendous, now that she was in the very swirl, she
let no sign at all escape her; the Colonel and even his wife were
deceived into thinking that after all no great