may be that there is nothing to tell. I am to blame
for haste in alluding to any such thing. Forgive me, sweet--forgive me.'
Her heart was ready to burst, and she could not answer him. He returned
to his place and took to the oars.

They again made for the distant Esplanade, now, with its line of houses,
lying like a dark grey band against the light western sky. The sun
had set, and a star or two began to peep out. They drew nearer their
destination, Edward as he pulled tracing listlessly with his eyes the
red stripes upon her scarf, which grew to appear as black ones in the
increasing dusk of evening. She surveyed the long line of lamps on the
sea-wall of the town, now looking small and yellow, and seeming to send
long tap-roots of fire quivering down deep into the sea. By-and-by they
reached the landing-steps. He took her hand as before, and found it as
cold as the water about them. It was not relinquished till he reached
her door. His assurance had not removed the constraint of her manner:
he saw that she blamed him mutely and with her eyes, like a captured
sparrow. Left alone, he went and seated himself in a chair on the
Esplanade.

Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she did
in such a state of desperate heaviness. When Springrove was out of sight
she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to see him
sit down. Then she glided pensively along the pavement behind him,
forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as she mused in his
neighbourhood unseen. She heard, without heeding, the notes of pianos
and singing voices from the fashionable houses at her back, from the
open windows of which the lamp-light streamed to join that of the
orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay in front. Then Edward
began to pace up and down, and Cytherea, fearing that he would notice
her, hastened homeward, flinging him a last look as she passed out of
sight. No promise from him to write: no request that she herself would
do so--nothing but an indefinite expression of hope in the face of some
fear unknown to her. Alas, alas!

When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room, and
creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered her there
lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her hat and
jacket on. She had flung herself down on entering, and succumbed to
the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends full-blown love. The wet
traces of tear