ore a Leghorn garden-hat, tied
with pink ribbons under her chin, and in her morning freshness and
daintiness she looked about seventeen. The hours of sleep had calmed the
restlessness of the wide, brown eyes; they were full now of gentleness
and mirth.

"I wonder if he'll come?"

She looked up and listened. And as she did so, her eyes and sense were
seized with the beauty of the wood. The mystery of early solitary hours
seemed to be still upon it; both in the sunlight and the shadow there
was a magic unknown to the later day. In a clearing before her spread a
lake of willow-herb, of a pure bright pink, hemmed in by a golden shore
of ragwort. The splash of color gave Kitty a passionate delight.

"Dear, dear world!" She stretched out her hands to it in a childish
greeting.

Then the joy died sharply from her eyes. "How many years left--to enjoy
it in--before one dies--or one's heart dies?"

Invariably, now, her moments of sensuous pleasure ended in this dread of
something beyond--of a sudden drowning of beauty and delight--of a
future unknown and cruel, coming to meet her, like some armed assassin
in a narrow path.

William! When it came could William save her? "William is a <i>darling</i>!"
she said to herself, her face full of yearning.

As for that other--it gave her an intense pleasure to think of the
flames creeping up the form and face of the photograph. Should she hear,
perhaps, in a week or two that he had been seized with some mysterious
illness, like the witch-victims of old? A shiver ran through her, a
thrill of repentance--till the bitter lines of the poem came back to
memory--lines describing a woman with neither the courage for sin nor
the strength for virtue, a "light woman" indeed, whom the great passions
passed eternally by, whom it was a humiliation to court and a mere
weakness to regret. Then she laughed, and began again with passionate
zest upon the sheets before her.

A sound of approaching footsteps on the wood-path. She half rose,
smiling.

The branches parted, and Darrell appeared. He paused to survey the oread
vision of Lady Kitty.

"Am I not to the minute?" He held up his watch in front of her.

"So you got my note?"

"Certainly. I was immensely flattered." He threw himself down on the
moss beside her, his sallow, long-chinned face and dark eyes toned to a
morning cheerfulness, his dress much fresher and more exact than usual.
"But he is one of the men who look so much better in t