“I shall see you in the morning,” she said, pausing.

“I am making an early start,” said Capper.

She smiled.  “I shall see you all the same.  Good-night.”

Capper kept her hand in his, his green eyes running over her with elusive intentness.  “Wonder what you’ll do,” he said abruptly.

She met his look quite simply.  “For the present,” she said, “I must be with Mrs. Errol.  Later on—­next month—­she will no doubt go to the Dower House, and I shall go back to the Manor.”

“Don’t mope!” he said.

She smiled again with a short sigh.  “I shall be too busy for that.”

“That so?” Capper drew his brows together.  “Lady Carfax, at risk of offending you, I’ve something to say.”

“You will not offend me,” she answered.  “And I think I know what it is.”

“Very possibly you do, but I guess I’d better say it all the same.  You may remember a talk we had at the commencement of our acquaintance, regarding Nap.  I told you he was just a wild animal, untamable, untrustworthy.  Well, you have proved me wrong.  You have worked a miracle, and you have tamed him.  Lucas himself told me about it the day before he died.”

“Oh, no!” Anne said quickly and earnestly.  “It was Lucas who worked the miracle, Doctor.  The magic was his.”

“Guess he wouldn’t have done it single-handed,” said Capper.  “He’d been trying as long as I had known him, and he hadn’t succeeded.”  He paused, looking at her with great kindness.  Then:  “My dear,” he said, “you needn’t be afraid to trust yourself to him.  He will never let you down again.”

Anne stood silent, but under his look a deep flush rose and overspread her face.  She turned her eyes away.

Very gently Capper patted her shoulder.  “You’ve made a man of him between you,” he said.  “Lucas has left the developing process to you.”

“Ah!” she said wistfully, and that was all, for her eyes were suddenly full of tears.

She went to the door and stood there for several seconds.  The voice of a nightingale thrilled through the silence.  Was it only a year—­only a year—­since the veil had been rent from her eyes?  Only a year since first her heart had throbbed to “the everlasting Wonder Song”?  She felt as if eons had passed over her, as if the solitude of ages wrapped her round; and yet afar off, like dream music in her soul, she still heard its echoes pulsing across the desert.  It held her like a charm.

Slowly her tears passed.  There came again to her that curious sense of something drawing her, almost as of a voice that called.  The garden lay still and mysterious in the moonlight.  She caught its gleam upon a corner of the lake where it shone like a wedge of silver.

A few seconds she stood irresolute; then without word or backward glance she stepped down into the magic silence.

CHAPTER XVIII