ty with the window, but the outer shutters creaked
when she opened them. Then she passed on to the first of the Italian
terraces, and stood there irresolutely a few minutes, gazing
alternately at the sky and the black masses of the trees. At first she
was a trifle nervous. The air was so still, the park so solemn in its
utter quietude, that the sense of adventure was absent, and the
funeral silence that prevailed was almost oppressive.

Half inclined to go back, woman-like she went forward. Then the sweet,
clinging scent of a rose bed drew her like a magnet. She descended a
flight of steps and gained the second terrace. She thought of
Trenholme and the picture, and the impulse to stroll as far as the
lake seized her irresistibly. Why not! The grass was short, and the
dew would not be heavy. Even if she wetted her feet, what did it
matter, as she would undress promptly on returning to her room?
Besides, she had never seen the statue on just such a night, though
she had often visited it by moonlight.

La Rochefoucauld is responsible for the oft quoted epigram that the
woman who hesitates is lost, and Sylvia had certainly hesitated. At
any rate, after a brief debate in which the arguments were distinctly
one-sided, she resolved that she might as well have an object in view
as stroll aimlessly in any other direction; so, gathering her skirts
to keep them dry, she set off across the park.

She might have been halfway to the lake when a man emerged from the
same window of the drawing-room, ran to the terrace steps, stumbled
down them so awkwardly that he nearly fell, and swore at his own
clumsiness in so doing. He negotiated the next flight more carefully,
but quickened his pace again into a run when he reached the open. The
girl's figure was hardly visible, but he knew she was there, and the
distance between pursued and pursuer soon lessened.

Sylvia, wholly unaware of being followed, did not hurry; but she was
constitutionally incapable of loitering, and moved over the rustling
grass with a swiftness that brought her to the edge of the lake while
the second inmate of The Towers abroad that night was yet a couple of
hundred yards distant.

In the dim light the statue assumed a lifelike semblance that was at
once startling and wonderful. Color flies with the sun, and the white
marble did not depend now on tint alone to differentiate it from flesh
and blood. Seen thus indistinctly, it might almost be a graceful and
nearl