‘Mother!’ Millicent’s distant voice, fresh and strong and pure in the night, chanted the word startlingly to the first notes of a phrase from the Jewel Song.  ‘Mother!  Aren’t you coming in?’ The girl finished the phrase with inviting gaiety, holding the final syllable.  And the sound faded, went out, like the flare of a rocket in the sky, and the dark stillness was emphasised.

They did not move; they did not speak; but Leonora pressed his hand.  The passing thought of the orderly, multifarious existence of the house behind her, of the warmed and lighted rooms, of the preoccupied lives, only increased the felicity of her halcyon dream.  And in the dreamy and brooding silence all things retreated and gradually lapsed away, and the pair were left sole amid the ineffable spaces of the universe to listen to the irregular beatings of their own hearts.  Time itself had paused.

‘Mother!’ Millicent sang again, nearer, more strongly and purely in the night.  ‘We are waiting for you to come in!’ She varied a little the phrase from the Jewel Song.  ‘To come in!’ The long sustained notes seemed to become a beautiful warning, and then the sound expired.

Leonora withdrew her hand.

‘I shall think it out, and write you to-morrow,’ Arthur whispered, and was gone.

* * * * *

The next day, after a futile morning of hesitations, Leonora decided in the afternoon that she would go out for a walk and return in some definite state of mind.  She loosed Bran, and the dog, when he had finished his elephantine gambades, followed her close at heel, with all stateliness, to the wide marsh on the brow of the hill.  Here she began actively and seriously to cogitate.

John was sulking; and it was seldom that he sulked.  He had not spoken to her again, neither on the previous evening nor at breakfast; he had said nothing whatever to any one, except to tell Bessie that he should not be at home for dinner; on committee-meeting days, when he was engaged at the Town Hall, John sometimes dined at the Tiger.  His attitude produced small effect on Leonora.  She was far too completely absorbed in herself to be perturbed by the offensive symptoms of her husband’s wrath.  She had neglected even to call on Uncle Meshach; and as she strolled about the marsh she thought vaguely and perfunctorily that she must see Uncle Meshach soon and acquaint him with John’s difficulties.

Pride as much as joy and alarm filled her heart.  She was proud of her perilous love; she would have liked proudly to confide it to some friend, some mature and brilliant woman who knew the world and understood things, and who would talk rationally; it seemed to her that this secret idyll, at once tender and sincere and rather dashing, was worthy of pride.  She knew that many women, languishing in the greyness of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the