figure
became an indubitable fact. Presently she knew that it was Arthur. 'At
last!' her heart passionately exclaimed, and she was swept and drenched
with happiness as a ship by the ocean. She forgot everything in the
tremendous shock of joy. She felt as though she could have waited no
more, and that now she might expire in a bliss intense and fatal, in a
sigh of supreme content. She could not stir nor speak, and he was
striding towards the wicket unconscious of her nearness! She coughed, a
delicate feminine cough, and then he turned aside from the direction of
the wicket and approached the fence, peering.

'Is that you?' he asked.

'Yes.'

Across the fence they clasped hands. And in spite of her great wish not
to do so she clutched his hand tightly in her long fingers, and held it
for a moment. And as she felt the returning pressure of his large,
powerful, protective grasp, she covered--but in imagination only--she
covered his face, which she could shadowily see, with brave and
abandoned kisses; and she whispered to him, but unheard: 'Admit that I
am made for love.' She feared, in those beautiful and shameless
instants, neither John, nor Ethel and Milly, nor even Rose. She knew
suddenly why men and women leave all--honour, duty, and affection--and
follow love. Then her arm dropped, and there was silence.

'What are you doing here?' She was unable to speak in an ordinary tone,
but she spoke. Her voice exquisitely trembled, and its vibrations said
everything that the words did not say.

'Why,' he answered, and his voice too bore strange messages, 'I called
at Church Street and Mr. Myatt said you had only been gone a few
minutes, and so I came right away. I guessed I should overtake you. I
don't know what he would think.' Arthur laughed nervously.

She smiled at him, satisfied. And how well she knew that her smiling
face, caught by him dimly in the obscurity of the night, troubled him
like an enchanting and enigmatic vision!

After they had looked at each other, speechless, for a while, the strong
influence of convention forced them again into unnecessary, irrelevant
talk.

'What's this about you selling this place?' he inquired in a low, mild
tone.

'Have you heard?'

'Yes,' he said, 'I did hear something.'

'Ah!' she murmured, wrinkling her forehead in a pretty make-believe of
woe--the question of the sale had ceased to be acute: 'I just came out
here to think about it.'

'But you aren't really going t