used to slink up--seldom, it's true--and spend the evening with them
as before. One afternoon I came up to the sitting-room; the light was
failing--it was warm, and the windows were open. In the air was that
feeling which comes to you once a year, in the spring, no matter where
you may be, in a crowded street, or alone in a forest; only once--a
feeling like--but I cannot describe it.

"Eilie was sitting there. If you don't know, sir, I can't tell you
what it means to be near the woman one loves. She was leaning on the
windowsill, staring down into the street. It was as though she might
be looking out for some one. I stood, hardly breathing. She turned
her head, and saw me. Her eyes were strange. They seemed to ask me a
question. But I couldn't have spoken for the world. I can't tell you
what I felt--I dared not speak, or think, or hope. I have been in
nineteen battles--several times in positions of some danger, when the
lifting of a finger perhaps meant death; but I have never felt what
I was feeling at that moment. I knew something was coming; and I was
paralysed with terror lest it should not come!" He drew a long breath.

"The servant came in with a light and broke the spell. All that night
I lay awake and thought of how she had looked at me, with the colour
coming slowly up in her cheeks--

"It was three days before I plucked up courage to go again; and then I
felt her eyes on me at once--she was making a 'cat's cradle' with a bit
of string, but I could see them stealing up from her hands to my face.
And she went wandering about the room, fingering at everything. When her
father called out: 'What's the matter with you, Elie?' she stared at him
like a child caught doing wrong. I looked straight at her then, she
tried to look at me, but she couldn't; and a minute later she went out
of the room. God knows what sort of nonsense I talked--I was too happy.

"Then began our love. I can't tell you of that time. Often and often
Dalton said to me: 'What's come to the child? Nothing I can do pleases
her.' All the love she had given him was now for me; but he was too
simple and straight to see what was going on. How many times haven't I
felt criminal towards him! But when you're happy, with the tide in your
favour, you become a coward at once...."

V

"Well, sir," he went on, "we were married on her eighteenth birthday. It
was a long time before Dalton became aware of our love. But one day he
said to me with a very