And with me, at least, that fount, unexpectedly penned by the first hints
of disaster, had still played furiously in my mind as I had walked with
Frank Jervaise through the wood. My intoxicated imagination had created
its own setting. I had gone, exalted, to meet my wonderful fate. Through
some strange scene of my own making I had strayed to the very feet of
enduring romance.

But after that exciting prelude, when the moon had set and slow dawn, like
a lifting curtain, had been drawn to reveal the landscape of a world
outside the little chamber of my own being, I had been cast from my
heights of exaltation into a gloomy pit of disgrace. Fate, with a
fastidious particularity, had hauled me back to the things of everyday. I
was not to be allowed to dream too long. I was wanted to play my part in
this sudden tragedy of experience.

My thought went off at a tangent when I reached that point of my
reflection. I had found myself involved in the Banks's drama, but what
hope had I of ever seeing them again after the next day? What, moreover,
was the great thing I was called upon to do? I had decided only an hour or
two before that my old way of life had become impossible for me, but
equally impossible was any way of life that did not include the presence
of Anne.

I looked at my watch, and found that it was after ten o'clock, but how
long I had been standing at the gate, I had no idea; whether an hour or
ten minutes. I had been dreaming again, lost in imaginative delights;
until the reminder of this new urgency had brought me back to a reality
that demanded from me an energy of participation and of initiative.

I wished that Anne would come--and by way of helping her should she,
indeed, have come out to look for me, I strolled back to the Farm, and
then round to the front of the house.

The windows of the sitting-room had been closed but the blinds were not
drawn. The lamp had been lit and splayed weak fans of yellow light on to
the gravel, and the flower-beds of the grass plot. The path of each beam
was picked out from the diffused radiance of the moonlight, by the dancing
figures of the moths that gathered and fluttered across the prisms of
these enchanted rays. But I did not approach the windows. In the stillness
of the night I could hear Anne's clear musical voice. She was still there
in the sitting-room, still soothing and persuading her father. Her actual
words were indistinguishable, but the modulations of her tone s