fter felling me that much Fyne sat helpless in unconclusive agony.
Going to bed was out of the question--neither could any steps be taken
just then. What to do with himself he did not know!

I asked him if this was the same young lady I saw a day or two before I
went to town? He really could not remember. Was she a girl with dark
hair and blue eyes? I asked further. He really couldn't tell what
colour her eyes were. He was very unobservant except as to the
peculiarities of footpaths, on which he was an authority.

I thought with amazement and some admiration that Mrs Fyne's young
disciples were to her husband's gravity no more than evanescent shadows.
However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that--yes,
her hair was of some dark shade.

"We had a good deal to do with that girl first and last," he explained
solemnly; then getting up as if moved by a spring he snatched his cap
off the table. "She may be back in the cottage," he cried in his bass
voice. I followed him out on the road.

It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness,
of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid
revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies.
Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart;
and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran
back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit
before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient,
phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the
other hand there was something fascinating in the very absurdity. He
cut along in his best pedestrian style and I found myself let in for a
spell of severe exercise at eleven o'clock at night.

In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the
vast obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was
like a bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer. Inside, at
the table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs Fyne sitting with folded arms
and not a hair of her head out of place. She looked exactly like a
governess who had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just
the neutral manner of a governess. To her husband, too, for that
matter.

Fyne told her that I was fully informed. Not a muscle of her ruddy
smooth handsome face moved. She had sc