sit down and cross my
legs and say that fate, or whatever you call it, hasn't done me right?
Do you suppose that two sensible persons like you and me are going to be
beaten by a mere set of circumstances? We aren't children, and we aren't
fools.'

'But----'

'You're not afraid, are you?' He drank in her charm.

'What of?'

'Anything.'

'It's when you aren't there,' she murmured tenderly. She really thought,
then, that by some marvellous plan he would perform the impossible feat
of reconciling the duty of fulfilling love with all the other duties.

'I shall reckon it up,' he said. 'Ah!'

Silence fell. And with the feel of the grass under her feet, and the
soft clouds overhead, and the patient trees, and the glare in the
southern smoke, and the lamps of Bursley, and the solitary red signal in
the valley, she breathed out her spirit like an aerial essence, and
merged into unity with him. And the strange far-off noises of nocturnal
industry wandered faintly across the void and seemed fraught with a
mysterious significance. Everything, in that unique hour, had the same
mysterious significance.

'Mother!' Millicent's distant voice, fresh and strong and pure in the
night, chanted the word startlingly to the first notes of a phrase from
the Jewel Song. 'Mother! Aren't you coming in?' The girl finished the
phrase with inviting gaiety, holding the final syllable. And the sound
faded, went out, like the flare of a rocket in the sky, and the dark
stillness was emphasised.

They did not move; they did not speak; but Leonora pressed his hand. The
passing thought of the orderly, multifarious existence of the house
behind her, of the warmed and lighted rooms, of the preoccupied lives,
only increased the felicity of her halcyon dream. And in the dreamy and
brooding silence all things retreated and gradually lapsed away, and the
pair were left sole amid the ineffable spaces of the universe to listen
to the irregular beatings of their own hearts. Time itself had paused.

'Mother!' Millicent sang again, nearer, more strongly and purely in the
night. 'We are waiting for you to come in!' She varied a little the
phrase from the Jewel Song. 'To come in!' The long sustained notes
seemed to become a beautiful warning, and then the sound expired.

Leonora withdrew her hand.

'I shall think it out, and write you to-morrow,' Arthur whispered, and
was gone.

* * * * *

The next day, after a futile m