silence.

Ingolby felt his blood beat faster. He had a feeling that he was looking
at a wood-nymph who might flash out of his vision as a mere fantasy of
the mind. There shot through him the strangest feeling that if she were
his, he would be linked with something alien to the world of which he
was.

Yet, recalling the day at Carillon when her cheek lay on his shoulder
and her warm breast was pressed unresistingly against him, as he lifted
her from his boat, he knew that he would have to make the hardest
fight of his life if he meant not to have more of her than this brief
acquaintance, so touched by sensation and romance. He was, maybe,
somewhat sensational; his career had, even in its present restricted
compass, been spectacular; but romance, with its reveries and its
moonshinings, its impulses and its blind adventures, had not been any
part of his existence.

Hers were not the first red lips which, voluntarily or involuntarily,
had invited him; nor hers the first eyes which had sparkled to his
glances; and this triumphant Titian head of hers was not the only one he
had seen.

When he had taken her hand at the Hospital Fete, her fingers, long and
warm and fine, had folded round his own with a singular confidence,
an involuntary enclosing friendliness; and now as he watched her
listening--did she hear something?--he saw her hand stretch out as
though commanding silence, the "hush!" of an alluring gesture.

This assuredly was not the girl who had run the Carillon Rapids, for
that adventuress was full of a vital force like a man's, and this girl
had the evanishing charm of a dryad.

Suddenly a change passed over her. She was as one who had listened and
had caught the note of song for which she waited; but her face clouded,
and the rapt look gave way to an immediate distress. The fantasy of the
wood-nymph underwent translation in Ingolby's mind; she was now like a
mortal, who, having been transformed, at immortal dictate was returning
to mortal state again.

To heighten the illusion, he thought he heard faint singing in the
depths of the wood. He put his hands to his ears for a moment, and took
them away again to make sure that it was really singing and not his
imagination; and when he saw Fleda's face again, there was fresh
evidence that his senses had not deceived him. After all, it was not
strange that some one should be singing in that deepest wood beyond.

Now Fleda moved forward towards where he stood, qui