“I do love her,” he declared to himself.  “All summer long I have uttered blasphemies.  I do love her.  Whatever she may have been, she shall be my wife.”

Out on the terrace the cold wind was grateful, and he stood for a minute bareheaded, letting it blow over his fevered face and through his hair.  It had risen during the last hour, making the pines rock slowly in the starlight and swelling their moan into deep sobs.

As Derek Pruyn paced the terrace in strained expectation he was deceived again and again into the thought that something was approaching.  Now it was the champing and stamping of horses toiling up the ascent; now it was the bray and throb of the automobile; now it was the voices of men, conversing or calling or breaking into laughter.  Twenty times he hastened to the steps at the end of the terrace, sure he could not have been mistaken, only to hear the earth-forces sob and sough and shout again, as if in derision of this puny, presumptuous mortal, with his evanescent joy and pain.

So another hour passed.  His mind was not of the imaginative order which invents disaster in moments of suspense, so that he was able to keep his watch more patiently than many another might have done.  Once he tried to smoke; but the mere scent of tobacco seemed out of place in this curious world, alive with odd psychical suggestions, and he threw the cigar away into the darkness, where its light glowed reproachfully, like a dying eye, till it went out.

It was after three when a sudden sound from the driveway struck his ear; but he had been deceived so often that he would pay it no attention.  Though it seemed like the unmistakable approach of an automobile, it had seemed so before, and he would not even look round till he had reached the distant end of the terrace.  When he turned he could see through the trees, and along the dark line of the avenue, the advance of the heralding light.  Dorothea had come at last.  She was even close upon them.  In a few more seconds she would be alighting at the steps.

He hurried inside to wake the porter and warn Diane.

“She’s here!” he called, rapping sharply at her door.  “Please come!  Quick!”

There was a response and a hurried movement from within, but he did not wait for her to appear.  When she came out of her room she could see from the light thrown over the terrace that the motor had already stopped at the steps.  Some one was getting out, and she could hear men’s voices.  Advancing to a spot midway between her room and the main entry, she stood waiting for Derek to bring her his daughter.  A moment later he sprang into the light of the doorway with features white and alarmed.

“Go back!” he cried to her, with a commanding gesture.  “Go back!”

“But what’s the matter?”

“Go back!” he ordered, more imperiously than before.

“Oh, Derek, it’s Dorothea!  She’s hurt.  I must go to her.  I will not go back.”