wilful, and she had liked to say that she would go away with him.  She knew not whether she could fulfil her promise, but it had been a joy to give it.  They had walked slowly towards Dulwich, the groom had brought round the dog-cart; Owen had asked her once more to get in.  Oh, to drive away with him through the night!  “Owen, it is impossible,” she said; “I cannot, at least not now.  But I will one day very soon, sooner perhaps than you think.”

He had driven away, and, standing on the moon-whitened road, she had watched the white dust whirl about the wheels.

One of the difficulties in the indulgence of these voluptuous meditations was that they necessitated the omission of her evening prayers.  She could not kneel by her bedside and pray to God to deliver her from evil, all the while nourishing in her heart the intention of abandoning herself to the thought of Owen the moment she got into bed.  Nor did the omission of her evening prayers quite solve the difficulty, for when she could think no more of Owen, the fear of God returned.  She dared not go to sleep, and lay terrified, dreading the devil in every corner of the room.  Lest she might die in her sleep and be summoned before the judgment seat, she lay awake as long as she could.

When she fell asleep she dreamed of the stage when the world was won, and when it seemed she had only to stretch her hands to the sky to take the stars.  But in the midst of her triumph she perceived that she could no longer sing the music the world required; a new music was drumming in her ears, drowning the old music, a music written in a melancholy mode, and played on invisible harps.  Owen told her it was madness to listen, and she strove to close her ears against it.  In great trouble of mind she awoke; it was only a dream, and she had not lost her voice.  She lay back upon the pillow and tried to recall the music which she had heard on the invisible harps, but already it was forgotten; it faded from her brain like mist from the surface of a mere.  But the humour that the dream had created endured after the dream was dead.  She felt no longer as she had felt over night, and lay in a sort of obtuse sensibility of conscience.  She got up and dressed, her mind still clouded and sullen, and her prayers were said in a sort of middle state between fervour and indifference.  Her father attributed her mood to the old cause; several times he was on the point of speaking, and she held him for the moment by the lappet of his coat and looked affectionately into his face.  But something told her that if she were to confide her trouble to anyone, she would lose the power she had acquired over herself.  Something told her that all the strength on her side was reposed in the secrecy of the combat.  If it were known, she could imagine herself saying—­

“Well, nothing matters now; let us go away, Owen.”

He was coming to see her between eleven and twelve—­at the very time he knew her father would be away from home, and this very fact stimulated her ethical perception.  Her manner was in accordance with her mood, and the moment he entered he saw that something had happened, that she was no longer the same Evelyn from whom he had parted a couple of nights before.