arm gently.

"Hush, hush!" he said. "Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?"

"I do?" she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly
sense of laughter as at a child "Bees and midges, late things like
ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies."

"They are, of course they are," he protested, laughing. "At least a
second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread
on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet"--his humour came back--"even
yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other
path."

"What, and waste ten minutes more!" she cried "Follow me, follow me!"

And she sped swiftly over the trim grass, bruising the odours of the
night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself,
very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all
his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of
sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity.
He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book
again to please or to deceive the Philistine.

"I thought we could bring it all back again--that was the object of my
rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past."

They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly.

"And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions
about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you
ever written anything?"

He found himself extremely warm. Her question for the first time
suggested his own possibilities. No, he had never made poetry, he
confessed, though he had often felt it, as good as some of the poetry he
had read in Marget Maclean's books that were still the favourites of his
leisure hours.

"It'll be in that like other things," she said with some sense of her
own cruelty. "You must be dreaming it when you might be making it."

"I never had the inspiration----"

"What, you say that to a lady who has been talking fair to you!" she
pointed out.

"But now, of course---"

"Just the weather, Gilian," she hastened to interject. "A bonny night
with stars, the scent of flower, a misty garden--I could find some
inspiration in them myself for poetry, and I make no pretence at it."

"There was a little more," he said meaningly; "but no matter, that may
wait," and he proceeded immediately to the making of a poem as he went,
the subject a night of stars and a m