Her suicidal plunge had been arrested, at only a few feet from the top of the shaft, by a cross-stay of timber, upon which she lay prone.  There was no reason why the affair should be made public, and it was not.  It was suppressed into one of those secrets which embed themselves in the history of families, and after two or three generations blossom into romantic legends full of appropriate circumstantial detail.

Lionel Woolley spent a woeful night at his rooms.  He did not know what to do, and on the following day May Lawton encountered him again, and proved by her demeanour that the episode of the previous afternoon had caused no estrangement.  Lionel vacillated.  The sway of the schoolmistress was almost restored, and it would have been restored fully had he not been preoccupied by a feverish curiosity—­the curiosity to know whether or not May Deane was dead.  He felt that she must indeed be dead, and he lived through the day expectant of the news of her sudden decease.  Towards night his state of mind was such that he was obliged to call at the Deanes’.  May heard him, and insisted on seeing him; more, she insisted on seeing him alone in the breakfast-room, where she reclined, interestingly white, on the sofa.  Her father and brothers objected strongly to the interview, but they yielded, afraid that a refusal might induce hysteria and worse things.

And when Lionel Woolley came into the room, May, steeped in felicity, related to him the story of her impulsive crime.

‘I was so happy,’ she said, ’when I knew that Miss Lawton had deceived me.’  And before he could inquire what she meant, she continued rapidly:  ’I must have been unconscious, but I felt you were there, and something of me went out towards you.  And oh! the answer to your question—­I heard your question; the real me heard it, but that something could not speak.’

‘My question?’

‘You asked a question, didn’t you?’ she faltered, sitting up.

He hesitated, and then surrendered himself to her immense love and sank into it, and forgot May Lawton.

‘Yes,’ he said.

’The answer is yes.  Oh, you must have known the answer would be yes!  You did know, didn’t you?’

He nodded grandly.

She sighed with delicious and overwhelming joy.

In the ecstasy of the achievement of her desire the girl gave little thought to the psychic aspect of the possibly unique wooing.

As for Lionel, he refused to dwell on it even in thought.  And so that strange, magic, yearning effluence of a soul into a visible projection and shape was ignored, slurred over, and, after ten years of domesticity in the bank premises, is gradually being forgotten.

He is a man of business, and she, with her fading beauty, her ardent, continuous worship of the idol, her half-dozen small children, the eldest of whom is only eight, and the white window-curtains to change every week because of the smuts—­do you suppose she has time or inclination to ponder upon the theory of the subliminal consciousness and kindred mysteries?