ogy.'

'Paul,' said the Baroness, and the left hand on his right shoulder drew
him a little nearer to her. Once, a year or two before, he had been up
in the Yorkshire dales, and had strolled along by the side of the Wharfe
on a day when the river ran beryl-brown or sapphire clear as it glanced
over pebbly shallow or rocky depth. There was the beryl glint in her
eye--the darling brown with the liquid light playing upon it. He looked
now. The woodlands were about him; the river murmured near. The damnable
artistic gift which made use of all accomplished experience helped him
to obey the impulse of the slow, persuasive hand. The beryl light in the
eyes invited him, and the faint droop of languishing eyelid did the rest
'Paul dear,' she whispered, 'it is good-bye. You may kiss me just this
once and go. Kiss me, Paul dear, as you would kiss your mother's ghost,
and go.'

He stooped and kissed her, reverently and lingeringly, upon the
forehead.

'Good-bye,' he said--'good-bye.'

Then, with an electric amazement, her lips were on his for a single
instant, and she strained him near to her.

'Now, go,' she said, withdrawing herself before he had found time to
answer her embrace. 'Go, and farewell!'

He was in the upper corridor almost before he knew it, in the confusion
of his nerves. The key snapped quickly in the lock, and he was alone. He
groped his way along the darkened passage until he reached the head
of the stairs, and there he recovered some consciousness of fact. He
drooped slowly down into his study, and sat there in the dark and cold
for hours, swearing fealty to contradictory deities of passion and of
friendship.

CHAPTER XXI

That year winter had advanced with a delaying foot thus far across the
Belgian Ardennes, but this was the hour chosen by the icy king for the
beginning of his real siege of that region. Whilst Paul sat in his study
in the dark, the cold gathered about him tenser and more tense until he
was fain to seek the warmer shelter of his own room. There across the
gleaming darkness of the window-panes he could discern great broad
snowflakes loitering down one after the other as if intent on no
business in the world, and yet in spite of their seeming want of purpose
they had covered the earth six inches deep before daybreak.

He awoke in the morning to look out upon a world of virgin
white:--street, and roofs, and far-spread trees and fields all dazzling
in their winter cloak beneath a