A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

She sat beside the wide window of her bed-chamber, on that third
midnight at Gosnold House, in a state of lawless exaltation not less
physical than spiritual and mental, a temper that proscribed sleep
hopelessly.

The window was open, the night air still and suave and warm, her sole
protection a filmy negligee over a night-dress of sheerest silk and
lace. And in that hour Sarah Manvers was as nearly a beautiful woman
as ever she was to be--her face faintly flushed in the rich moonlight,
faintly shadowed from within by the rich darkness of her blood, her
dreaming eyes twin pools of limpid shadow, her dark lips shadowed by a
slight elusive smile.

She was relishing the sensation of life intensely, almost painfully;
she was intensely alive for the first time in all her life, it seemed;
in throat and wrists and temples pulses sang, now soft, now loud; and
all her body glowed, from crown of head to tips of toes nestling
in silken mules, with the warmth and the languor of life.

She was deeply and desperately in love.

The genius of her curious destiny, not content with making her free of
all the good material things of life, had granted her as well this
last and dearest boon. For though her years were twenty-seven she had
not loved before. She had dreamed of love, had been in love with love
and with being loved, had believed she loved; but nothing in her
experience compared with such rapture as to-night obsessed her being,
wholly and without respite.

Life, indeed, grants no compensation for the ignominious necessity of
love but this, that no other love was ever real but to-day's alone.

And so the beauty of that moonlight midnight seemed supernal.
Becalmed, the island lay steeped in floods of ethereal silver, its sky
an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its
lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was
never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many
interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet
below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations,
sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast
serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A
night of potent witchery, a woman willingly bewitched. . . .

In fancy she still could feel the pulsing of his heart against her
bosom, the caressing touch of his hands, the warm flutter of his
breath in her hair