subdued, timid, humble—­childlike, and yet not a child.  Her face was pale; her eyelids seemed weighted over her eyes, so that she could not raise them; her breath came with so much difficulty that she was forced to unclose her lips for air; she trembled as if with a sudden chill, and yet her veins seemed running with fire; and she felt as if the earth moved under her feet.  What malady was this that had overtaken her so suddenly?  What did it all mean?  It was something like that strange sensation which she had had a few hours back in the wood, when Mr. Gryce had seemed to her like some compelling spirit questioning her of her life, while she was his victim, forced to reveal all.  And yet it was the same, with a difference.  That had been torture covered down by an anodyne:  this was in its essence ecstasy, if on the outside pain.

“Look at me, Leam,” half whispered Edgar, bending over her.

She raised her eyes with shame and difficulty—­very slowly, for their lids were so strangely heavy; very shyly, for there was something in them, she herself did not know what, which she did not wish him to see.  Nevertheless, she raised them because he bade her.  How sweet and strange it was to obey him against her own desire!  Did he know that she looked at him because he told her to do so? and that she would have rather kept her eyes to the ground?  Yes, she raised them and met his.

Veiled, humid, yearning, those eyes of hers told all—­all that she herself did not know, all that Edgar had now hoped, now feared, as passion or prudence had swayed him, as love or fitness had seemed the best circumstance of life.

“Leam!” he said in an altered voice:  she scarcely recognized it as his.  He took her hand in his, when suddenly there came two voices on the air, and Mr. Gryce and Sebastian Dundas, disputing hotly on the limits of the Unknowable, turned the corner and came upon them.

Then the moment and its meaning passed, the enchanted vision faded, and all that remained of that brief foretaste of Paradise before the serpent had entered or the forbidden fruit been tasted was the bald, prosaic fact of Major Harrowby bidding Miss Dundas good-day, too much pressed for time to stop and talk on the Unknowable.

“Disappointed, baulked, ill-used!” were Edgar’s first angry thoughts as he strode along the road:  his second, those that were deepest and truest to his real self, came with a heavy sigh.  “Saved just in time from making a fool of myself,” he said below his breath, his eyes turned in the direction of the Hill.  “It must be a warning for the future.  I must be more on my guard, unless indeed I make up my mind to tempt fortune and take the plunge—­for happiness such as few men have, or for the ruin of everything.”

Meanwhile, pending this determination, Edgar kept himself out of Leam’s way, and days passed before they met again.  And when they did next meet it was in the churchyard, in the presence of the assembled congregation, with Alick Corfield as the centre of congratulation on his first resumption of duty, and Leam and Edgar separated by the crowd and stiffened by conventionality into coldness.