ds seemed weighted over her eyes, so that she could
not raise them; her breath came with so much difficulty that she was
forced to unclose her lips for air; she trembled as if with a sudden
chill, and yet her veins seemed running with fire; and she felt as
if the earth moved under her feet. What malady was this that had
overtaken her so suddenly? What did it all mean? It was something like
that strange sensation which she had had a few hours back in the
wood, when Mr. Gryce had seemed to her like some compelling spirit
questioning her of her life, while she was his victim, forced to
reveal all. And yet it was the same, with a difference. That had been
torture covered down by an anodyne: this was in its essence ecstasy,
if on the outside pain.

"Look at me, Leam," half whispered Edgar, bending over her.

She raised her eyes with shame and difficulty--very slowly, for their
lids were so strangely heavy; very shyly, for there was something in
them, she herself did not know what, which she did not wish him to
see. Nevertheless, she raised them because he bade her. How sweet and
strange it was to obey him against her own desire! Did he know that
she looked at him because he told her to do so? and that she would
have rather kept her eyes to the ground? Yes, she raised them and met
his.

Veiled, humid, yearning, those eyes of hers told all--all that she
herself did not know, all that Edgar had now hoped, now feared, as
passion or prudence had swayed him, as love or fitness had seemed the
best circumstance of life.

"Leam!" he said in an altered voice: she scarcely recognized it as
his. He took her hand in his, when suddenly there came two voices on
the air, and Mr. Gryce and Sebastian Dundas, disputing hotly on the
limits of the Unknowable, turned the corner and came upon them.

Then the moment and its meaning passed, the enchanted vision faded,
and all that remained of that brief foretaste of Paradise before the
serpent had entered or the forbidden fruit been tasted was the bald,
prosaic fact of Major Harrowby bidding Miss Dundas good-day, too much
pressed for time to stop and talk on the Unknowable.

"Disappointed, baulked, ill-used!" were Edgar's first angry thoughts
as he strode along the road: his second, those that were deepest and
truest to his real self, came with a heavy sigh. "Saved just in time
from making a fool of myself," he said below his breath, his eyes
turned in the direction of the Hill. "It must be a