ware of a stern,
half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.

And the circumstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find
peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us,
widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak
radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing
wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in
that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending
forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched
weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper
clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset
it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and
more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original,
eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the
leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune.
Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was
as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.

But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even
the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised
drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a
fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in
the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the
artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures
of a process, but little gods in a world-pantheon.

* * * * *

I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised
tone of his voice--he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary
pitch--that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an
excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were
impossible, to attribute to another cause.

"It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that
visit of ours, Melhuish," he began.

"At least two," I agreed.

"Which are?" he asked.

"I'd prefer to hear yours first," I said, having no intention of
displaying my own.

He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my
probably worthless deductions.

"Well, in the first place," he said, "did it strike you as a curious fact
that Miss Ba