ent home
instantly, and told my father I had come to talk things over with him. A
note from Mary lay upon the hall-table as I came in and encountered my
father. "I thought it better to come down to you," I said with my
glance roving to find that, and then I met his eye. It wasn't altogether
an unkindly eye, but I winced dishonestly.

"Talking is better for all sorts of things," said my father, and wanted
to know if the weather had been as hot in London as it had been in
Burnmore.

Mary's note was in pencil, scribbled hastily. I was to wait after eleven
that night near the great rose bushes behind the pavilion. Long before
eleven I was there, on a seat in a thick shadow looking across great
lakes of moonlight towards the phantom statuary of the Italianate garden
and the dark laurels that partly masked the house. I waited nearly an
hour, an hour of stillness and small creepings and cheepings and goings
to and fro among the branches.

In the bushes near by me a little green glow-worm shared my vigil.

And then, wrapped about in a dark velvet cloak, still in her white
dinner dress, with shining, gleaming, glancing stones about her dear
throat, warm and wonderful and glowing and daring, Mary came flitting
out of the shadows to me.

"My dear," she whispered, panting and withdrawing a little from our
first passionate embrace, "Oh my dear!... How did I come? Twice before,
when I was a girl, I got out this way. By the corner of the conservatory
and down the laundry wall. You can't see from here, but it's easy--easy.
There's a tree that helps. And now I have come that way to you.
_You!..._

"Oh! love me, my Stephen, love me, dear. Love me as if we were never to
love again. Am I beautiful, my dear? Am I beautiful in the moonlight?
Tell me!...

"Perhaps this is the night of our lives, dear! Perhaps never again will
you and I be happy!...

"But the wonder, dear, the beauty! Isn't it still? It's as if nothing
really stood solid and dry. As if everything floated....

"Everyone in all the world has gone to sleep to-night and left the world
to us. Come! Come this way and peep at the house, there. Stoop--under
the branches. See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and
its eyes shut. One window is open, _my_ little window, Stephen! but that
is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black.

"Along here a little further is night-stock. Now--Now! Sniff, Stephen!
Sniff! The scent of it! It lies--like a ba