garden and call to Isabel, and Isabel
would wake and his chance be lost. His chance? Isabel had
rashly incurred a forfeit and would have to pay. The frolic was
old, there was plenty of precedent for it, and not for one moment
did Lawrence dream of letting her off. A moth, a dead leaf might
have settled on her sleeping lips and she would have been none
the wiser, and just such a moth's touch he promised himself, the
contact of a moment, but enough to intoxicate him with its
sweetness, and the first--yes, he believed it would be the
first: not from any special faith in Isabel's obduracy, but
because no one in Chilmark was enough of a connoisseur to
appreciate her. Yes, the first, the bloom on the fruit, the
unfolding of the bud, he promised himself that: and warily he
stooped over Isabel, who slept as tranquil as though she were in
her own room under the vicarage eaves. Lawrence held his breath.
If she were to wake? Then?--Oh, then the middleaged friend of
the family claiming his gloves and his jest! But Lawrence was
not feeling middle-aged.

"O! dear," said Isabel, "I've been asleep!"

She sat up rubbing her eyes. "Laura, are you there?" But no one
was there. Yet, though she was alone, in the solitude of the
alder shade Isabel blushed scarlet. "What a ridiculous dream!
worse than ridiculous, What would Val say if he knew? Really,
Isabel, you ought to be whipped!" She slipped to her feet and
peered suspiciously this way and that into the shadowy corners of
the wood. Not a step: not the rustle of a leaf: no one.

Yet Isabel's cheeks continued to burn, till with a little
frightened laugh she buried them in her hands. "O! it was--
it was a dream--?"

CHAPTER IX

Lawrence's reflections when he went to bed that night were more
insurgent and disorderly than usual. In his negative philosophy,
when he shut the door of his room, it was his custom to shut the
door on memory too--to empty his mind of all its contents except
the physical disposition to sleep. He cultivated an Indian's
self-involved and deliberate vacancy. On this his second night
at Wanhope however--Wanhope which was to bring him a good many
white nights before he was done with it--he lay long awake,
watching the stars that winked and glittered in the field of his
open window, the same stars that were perhaps shining on Isabel's
pillow. . . .

Isabel: it was on her that his thoughts ran with a tiring
persistency against which his co