She nodded, and lifted her face; he felt her hot soft lips on his
forehead, and went away a little comforted.

But Noel sat on her bed, hugging her knees, listening to the night,
to the emptiness and silence; each minute so much lost of the little,
little time left, that she might have been with him.

III

Pierson woke after a troubled and dreamful night, in which he had
thought himself wandering in heaven like a lost soul.

After regaining his room last night nothing had struck him more forcibly
than the needlessness of his words: "Don't cry, Nollie!" for he had
realised with uneasiness that she had not been near crying. No; there
was in her some emotion very different from the tearful. He kept seeing
her cross-legged figure on the bed in that dim light; tense, enigmatic,
almost Chinese; kept feeling the feverish touch of her lips. A good
girlish burst of tears would have done her good, and been a guarantee.
He had the uncomfortable conviction that his refusal had passed her by,
as if unspoken. And, since he could not go and make music at that time
of night, he had ended on his knees, in a long search for guidance,
which was not vouchsafed him.

The culprits were demure at breakfast; no one could have told that for
the last hour they had been sitting with their arms round each other,
watching the river flow by, talking but little, through lips too busy.
Pierson pursued his sister-in-law to the room where she did her flowers
every morning. He watched her for a minute dividing ramblers from
pansies, cornflowers from sweet peas, before he said:

"I'm very troubled, Thirza. Nollie came to me last night. Imagine! They
want to get married--those two!"

Accepting life as it came, Thirza showed no dismay, but her cheeks grew
a little pinker, and her eyes a little rounder. She took up a sprig of
mignonette, and said placidly:

"Oh, my dear!"

"Think of it, Thirza--that child! Why, it's only a year or two since she
used to sit on my knee and tickle my face with her hair."

Thirza went on arranging her flowers.

"Noel is older than you think, Edward; she is more than her age. And
real married life wouldn't begin for them till after--if it ever began."

Pierson experienced a sort of shock. His sister-in-law's words seemed
criminally light-hearted.

"But--but--" he stammered; "the union, Thirza! Who can tell what will
happen before they come together again!"

She looked at his quivering face, and said gen