gly became her; her slight figure looked
both graceful and dignified. The marble hue of her face, thus gleamed
upon, added to the statuesque effect; her eyes had a startled look,
their lids drooped as Wilfrid regarded her.

'You have been sitting here since you left us?' he asked, in a voice
attuned to the night's hush.

'I was tempted to come out; the night is so beautiful.'

'It is.'

He uttered the assent mechanically; his eyes, like hers, had fallen, but
he raised them again to her face. It seemed to him in this moment the
perfect type of spiritual beauty; the brow so broad and pure, the eyes
far-seeing in their maidenly reserve, the lips full, firm, of infinite
refinement and sweetness. He felt abashed before her, as he had never
done. They had stood thus but a moment or two, yet it seemed long to
both. Emily stepped from the wooden threshold on to the grass.

'Somebody wants the "Spectator,"' he said hurriedly. 'I believe I left
it here.'

'Yes, it is on the table.'

With a perfectly natural impulse, she quickly re-entered the house, to
reach the paper she had seen only a minute ago. Without reflection,
heart-beats stifling his thought, he stepped after her. The shadow made
her turn rapidly; a shimmer of silver light through the lattice-work
still touched her features; her lips were parted as if in fear.

'Emily!'

He did not know that he had spoken. The name upon his tongue, a name he
had said low to himself often to-day and yesterday, was born of the
throe which made fire-currents of his veins, the passion which at the
instant seized imperiously upon his being. She could not see his face,
and hers to him was a half-veiled glory, yet each knew the wild gaze,
the all but terror, in the other's eyes, that anguish which indicates a
supreme moment in life, a turning-point of fate.

She had no voice. Wilfrid's words at length made way impetuously.

'I thought I could wait longer, and try in the meanwhile to win your
kind thoughts for me; but I dare not part from you for so long, leaving
it a mere chance that you will come back. I must say to you what it
means, the hope of seeing you again. All the other desires of my life
are lost in that. You are my true self, for which I shall seek in vain
whilst I am away from you. Can you give me anything--a promise of kind
thought--a hope--to live upon till I see you?'

'I cannot come back.'

But for the intense stillness he could not have caught the words; they