In spite of the brave words he had used, he wondered to-night whether the three-foot hedge was not after all to prove the unassailable wall.  And it was important that he should know.  For if it were so, why then he had not called at the War Office in vain.  A proposal had been made to him—­that he should join a commission for the delimitation of a distant frontier.  A year’s work and an immediate departure—­those were the conditions.  Within two days he must make up his mind—­within ten days he must leave England.

Chayne pondered over the decision which he must make.  If he had lost Sylvia, here was the mission to accept.  For it meant complete severance, a separation not to be measured by miles alone, but by the nature of the work, and the comrades, and even the character of the vegetation.  He went to bed in doubt, thinking that the morning might bring him counsel.  It brought him a letter from Sylvia instead.

The letter was long; it was written in haste, it was written in great distress, so that words which were rather unkind were written down.  But the message of the letter was clear.  Chayne was not to come again to the House of the Running Water; nor to the little house in London when she returned to it.  They were not to meet again.  She did not wish for it.

Chayne burnt the letter as soon as he had read it, taking no offence at the hasty words.  “I seem to have worried her more than I thought,” he said to himself with a wistful smile.  “I am sorry,” and again as the sparks died out from the black ashes of the letter he repeated:  “Poor little girl.  I am very sorry.”

So the house would always be silent and empty.

Sylvia had written the letter in haste on the very evening of Chayne’s visit, and had hurried out to post it in fear lest she might change her mind in the morning.  But in the morning she was only aware of a great lightness of spirit.  She could now devote herself to the work of her life; and for two long tiring days she kept Walter Hine at her side.  But now he sought to avoid her.  The little energy he had ever had was gone, he alternated between exhilaration and depression; he preferred, it seemed, to be alone.  For two days, however, Sylvia persevered, and on the third her lightness of spirit unaccountably deserted her.

She drove with Walter Hine that morning, and something of his own irritability seemed to have passed into her; so that he turned to her and asked: 

“What have I done?  Aren’t you pleased with me?  Why are you angry?”

“I am not angry,” she replied, turning her great gray eyes upon him.  “But if you wish to know, I miss something.”

So much she owned.  She missed something, and she knew very well what it was that she missed.  Even as Chayne in his Sussex home had ached to know that the house lacked a particular presence, so it began to be with Sylvia in Dorsetshire.

“Yet he has been absent for a longer time,” she argued with herself, “and I have not missed him.  Indeed, I have been glad of his absence.”  And the answer came quickly from her thoughts.