s Morris was
glad, since he did not dare relax his watch for an instant. So sometimes
they sat silent, and sometimes by fits and starts they talked, their
lips close to each other's face, as though they were whispering to one
another.

To while away the weary time, Morris told his companion about his
invention, the aerophone. Then she in turn told him something of her
previous life--Stella was now a woman of four and twenty. It seemed
that her mother had died when she was fourteen at the rectory in
Northumberland, where she was born. After that, with short intervals,
she had spent five years in Denmark, whither her father came to
visit her every summer. Most of this time she passed at a school in
Copenhagen, going for her holidays to stay with her grandmother, who was
the widow of a small landowner of noble family, and lived in an ancient,
dilapidated house in some remote village. At length the grandmother
died, leaving to Stella the trifle she possessed, after which, her
education being completed, she returned to Northumberland to keep house
for her father. Here, too, it would seem that her life was very lonely,
for the place was but an unvisited coast village, and they were not
rich enough to mix much with the few county families who lived anywhere
within reach.

"Have you no brothers or sisters?" asked Morris.

Even then, numb as was her flesh with cold, he felt her wince at the
question.

"No, no," she answered, "none now--at least, none here. I have--I mean
I had--a sister, my twin, but she died when we were seventeen. This was
the most dreadful thing that ever happened to me, the thing which made
me what I am."

"I don't quite understand. What are you, then?"

"Oh, something very unsatisfactory, I am afraid, quite different from
other people. What Mr. Tomley said _you_ were, Mr. Monk, a mystic and
a dreamer of dreams; a lover of the dead; one who dwells in the past,
and--in the future."

Morris did not pursue the subject; even under their strange
circumstances, favourable as they were to intimacy and confidences, it
seemed impertinent to him to pry into the mysteries of his companion's
life. Only he asked, at hazard almost:

"How did you spend your time up there in Northumberland?"

"In drawing a little, in collecting eggs, moths, and flowers a great
deal; in practising with my violin playing and singing; and during the
long winters in making translations in my spare time of Norse sagas,
which no one