He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wall for some time.  When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhair which had dropped from her dress.

“That was a scene!” he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of his own hand.  “It carries one back to the days of the Romantics.  Was I Alfred de Musset?—­and she George Sand?  Did any of them ever taste a more poignant moment than I—­when she—­lay upon my breast?  To be helpless—­yet yield nothing—­it challenged me!  Yet I took no advantage—­none.  When she looked—­when her eye, her soul, was, for that instant, mine, then!—­Well!—­the world has rushed with me since I saw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a quality again.  What did I say?—­how much did I mean?  My God! how can I tell?  I began as an actor, did I finish as a man?”

He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron will quieting down each rebellious pulse.

“That poacher fellow did me a good turn. Dare! the word galled.  But, after all, what woman could say less?  And what matter?  I have held her in my arms, in a setting—­under a moon—­worthy of her.  Is not life enriched thereby beyond robbery?  And what harm?  Raeburn is not injured. She will never tell—­and neither of us will ever forget.  Ah!—­what was that?”

He walked quickly to the window.  What he had heard had been a dull report coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of the avenue.  As he reached the window it was followed by a second.

“That poacher’s gun?—­no doubt!”—­he strained his eyes in vain—­“Collision perhaps—­and mischief?  No matter!  I have nothing to do with it.  The world is all lyric for me to-night.  I can hear in it no other rhythm.”

* * * * *

The night passed away.  When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lying with wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it.  Her candle still burnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallest desire for sleep.  She had gone through shame and anguish.  But she would have scorned to pity herself.  Was it not her natural, inevitable portion?

“I will tell Aldous everything—­everything,” she said to herself for the hundredth time, as the light penetrated.  “Was that only seven striking—­seven—­impossible!”

She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the hours that must pass before she could see Aldous—­put all to the touch.

Suddenly she remembered Hurd—­then old Patton.

“He was dying last night,” she thought, in her moral torment—­her passion to get away from herself.  “Is he gone?  This is the hour when old people die—­the dawn.  I will go and see—­go at once.”

She sprang up.  To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance, of social amends, however small, however futile—­to propitiate herself, if but by a hairbreadth—­this, no doubt, was the instinct at work.  She dressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to make against the stiffness of her own young bones—­glad of her hunger and faintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought and conquered.