for you here”—­I had a premonition that he would raise no objection to that suggestion—­and then when he and Miss Banks were safely inside, I meant to go and find rapture in solitude.  The moon was certainly coming out; the dawn was due in three hours or so, and before me were unknown hills and woods.  I had no sort of doubt that I should find my rapture.  I may add that my plan did not include any further sight of Jervaise, his family, or their visitors, before breakfast next morning.

I had it all clear and settled.  I was already thrilling with the first ecstasies of anticipation.  But when the door was opened I turned my back on all that magical beauty of the night, and accompanied Jervaise into the house like a scurvy little mongrel with no will of its own.

I can’t account for that queer change of purpose.  It was purely spontaneous, due to something quite outside the realm of reason.  I was certainly not in love with Anne, then.  My only sight of her had left an impression as of an amateur copy of a Rembrandt done in Indian ink with a wet brush.  It is true that I had heard her voice like the low thrilling of a nightingale—­following a full Handel chorus of corncrakes.

* * * * *

She had evidently spent an active ten minutes while we waited for her.  She had done her hair, and she was, so far as I could judge from superficialities, completely dressed.  Also she had lighted the lamp in what I took to be the chief sitting-room of the farm.

As a room it deserved attention, but it was not until I had been there for ten minutes or more, that I realised all that the furniture of that room was not.  My first observations were solely directed to Miss Banks.

Jervaise had grossly maligned her by saying that she was “frightfully pretty.”  No one but a fool would have called her “pretty.”  Either she was beautiful or plain.  I saw, even then, that if the light of her soul had been quenched, she might appear plain.  Her features were good, her complexion, her colouring—­she was something between dark and fair—­but she did not rely on those things for her beauty.  It was the glow of her individuality that was her surpassing charm.  She had that supremely feminine vitality which sends a man crazy with worship.  You had to adore or dislike her.  There was no middle course.

And Jervaise quite obviously adored her.  All that tactful confession of his in the park had been a piece of artifice.  It had not, however, been framed to deceive me.  I do not believe that he considered me worth bothering about.  No, those admissions and denials of his had been addressed, without doubt, to a far more important person than myself.  They had been in the nature of a remonstrance and assurance spoken to Frank Jervaise by the heir to the estate; which heir was determined with all the force of his ferocious nose and dominant chin to help him, that he would not make a fool of himself for the sake of the daughter of a tenant farmer.  I had been nothing more than the register upon which he had tentatively engraved that resolve.  But he should have chosen a more stable testament than this avowal made to a whimsically-minded playwright with an absurd weakness for the beauties of a midnight wood.