For from the hollow at her feet the music of the mill stream rose to her ears through the still night, very clear and with a murmur of laughter.  Sylvia looked down toward it.  She saw it flashing like a riband of silver in the garden of the dark quiet house.  There was no breath of wind in that garden, and all the great trees were still.  She saw the intricate pattern of their boughs traced upon the lawn in black and silver.

“In that house I was born,” she said softly, “to the noise of that stream.  I am very glad to know that in that house, too, my great happiness has come to me.”

Chayne leaned forward, and sitting side by side with Sylvia, gazed down upon it with rapture.  Oh, wonderful house where Sylvia was born!  How much the world owed to it!

“It was there!” he said with awe.

“Yes,” replied Sylvia.  She was not without a proper opinion of herself, and it seemed rather a wonderful house to her, too.

“Perhaps on some such night as this,” he said, and at once took the words back.  “No!  You were born on a sunny morning of July and the blackbirds on the branches told the good news to the blackbirds on the lawn, and the stream took up the message and rippled it out to the ships upon the sea.  There were no wrecks that day.”

Sylvia turned to him, her face made tender by a smile, her dark eyes kind and bright.

“Hilary!” she whispered.  “Oh, Hilary!”

“Sylvia!” he replied, mimicking her tone.  And Sylvia laughed with the clear melodious note of happiness.  All her old life was whirled away upon those notes of laughter.  She leaned to her lover with a sigh of contentment, her hair softly touching his cheek; her eyes once more dropped to the still garden and the dark square house at the down’s foot.

“There you asked me to marry you, to go away with you,” she said, and she caught his hand and held it close against her breast.

“Yes, there I first asked you,” he said, and some distress, forgotten in these first perfect moments, suddenly found voice.  “Sylvia, why didn’t you come with me then?  Oh, my dear, if you only had!”

But Sylvia’s happiness was as yet too fresh, too loud at her throbbing heart for her to mark the jarring note.

“I did not want to then,” she replied lightly, and then tightening her clasp upon his hand.  “But now I do.  Oh, Hilary, I do!”

“If only you had wanted then!”

Though he spoke low, the anguish of his voice was past mistaking.  Sylvia looked at him quickly and most anxiously; and as quickly she looked away.

“Oh, no,” she whispered hurriedly.

Her happiness could not be so short-lived a thing.  Her heart stood still at the thought.  It could not be that she had set foot actually within the dreamland, to be forthwith cast out again.  She thought of the last week, its aching lonely hours.  She needed her lover at her side, longed for him with a great yearning, and would not let him go.