an issues and coarse
imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us. It
had but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own. All through the
long sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed
his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of
my tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires,
nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went
streaming home between three and four, to resume their lives, swept
and garnished, stripped and clean. But at dawn, when the ashes of
the world's gladness were ceasing to glow--it was a bleak dawn that
made me shiver in my thin summer clothes--I came across a field
to a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths. A queer sense
of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood puzzled. Then I was
moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at once a singularly
misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory. This was
the place! Here I had stood, there I had placed my old kite, and
shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day when I
should encounter Verrall.

Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its
last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of
the Beltane fires. So I walked through a world of gray ashes at
last, back to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of
my dear lost mother lay.

Section 3

I came back to Lowchester House very tired, very wretched; exhausted
by my fruitless longing for Nettie. I had no thought of what lay
before me.

A miserable attraction drew me into the great house to look again
on the stillness that had been my mother's face, and as I came into
that room, Anna, who had been sitting by the open window, rose to
meet me. She had the air of one who waits. She, too, was pale with
watching; all night she had watched between the dead within and
the Beltane fires abroad, and longed for my coming. I stood
mute between her and the bedside. . . .

"Willie," she whispered, and eyes and body seemed incarnate pity.

An unseen presence drew us together. My mother's face became resolute,
commanding. I turned to Anna as a child may turn to its nurse. I
put my hands about her strong shoulders, she folded me to her, and
my heart gave way. I buried my face in her breast and clung
to her weakly, and burst into a passion of weeping. . . .

She held me with hungry arms. She whis