three notes, clear as a bird's call, sounded from the
direction whither she had vanished, and Miss Rood's companion, breaking
off short a remark on the excessive dryness of the weather, bowed
awkwardly and also disappeared among the shadows.

When Miss Rood laid her hand on Mr. Morgan's arm to recall him to the
fact that they were now alone together, he turned quickly, and his eyes
swept her from head to foot, and then rested on her face with an
expression of intense curiosity and a wholly new interest, as if he were
tracing out a suddenly-suggested resemblance which overwhelmed him with
emotion. And as he gazed his eyes began to take fire from the faded
features on which they had rested so many years in mere complacent
friendliness, and she instinctively averted her face. Long intimacy had
made her delicately sensitive to his moods, and when he drew her arm in
his and turned to walk, although he had not uttered a word, she trembled
with agitation.

"Mary, we have had an extraordinary experience to-night," he said. The
old dreaminess in his voice, as of one narcotized or in a trance,
sometimes a little forced, as of one trying to dream, to which she had
become accustomed, and of which in her heart of hearts she was very
weary, was gone. In its place she recognized a resonance which still
further confused her with a sense of altered relations. His polarity had
changed: his electricity was no longer negative, but positive.

Her feminine instinct vaguely alarmed, she replied, "Yes, indeed, but it
is getting late. Hadn't we better go in?" What lent the unusual
intonation of timidity to her voice? Certainly nothing that she could
have explained.

"Not quite yet, Mary," he answered, turning his gaze once more fully
upon her.

Her eyes dropped before his, and a moment after fluttered up to find an
explanation for their behavior, only to fall again in blind panic. For,
mingling unmistakably with the curiosity with which he was still
studying her features, was a new-born expression of appropriation and
passionate complacency. Her senses whirled in a bewilderment that had a
suffocating sweetness about it. Though she now kept her eyes on the
ground, she felt his constant sidewise glances, and, desperately seeking
relief from the conscious silence that enveloped them like a vapor of
intoxicating fumes, she forced herself to utter the merest triviality
she could summon to her lips: "See that house." The husky tones betrayed
m