When we reached home the moon had already set; but some of her beams seemed to have been left behind within my heart, so pure and peaceful was the light which filled it.

The same feeling continued with me all through that evening.  After dinner some of the party played and sang.  As it was Sunday, and Lucy was rigid in her views, the music was of a sacred character.  I sat in a low armchair in a dark corner of the room, my mind too dreamy to think, and too passive to dream.  I hardly interchanged three words with Alan, who remained in a still darker spot, invisible and silent the whole time.  Only as we left the room to go to bed, I heard Lucy ask him if he had a headache.  I did not hear his answer, and before I could see his face he had turned back again into the drawing-room.

V

It was early, and when first I got to my room I felt little inclined for sleep.  I wandered to the window, and drawing aside the curtains, looked out upon the still, starlit sky.  At least I should rest quiet to-night.  The air was very clear, and the sky seemed full of stars.  As I stood there scraps of schoolroom learning came back to my mind.  That the stars were all suns, surrounded perhaps in their turn by worlds as large or larger than our own.  Worlds beyond worlds, and others farther still, which no man might number or even descry.  And about the distance of those wonderful suns too,—­that one, for instance, at which I was looking,—­what was it that I had been told?  That our world was not yet peopled, perhaps not yet formed, when the actual spot of light which now struck my sight first started from the star’s surface!  While it flashed along, itself the very symbol of speed, the whole of mankind had had time to be born, and live, and die!

My gaze dropped, and fell upon the dim, half-seen outline of the Dead Stone.  That woman too.  While that one ray speeded towards me her life had been lived and ended, and her body had rotted away into the ground.  How close together we all were!  Her life and mine; our joys, sufferings, deaths—­all crowded together into the space of one flash of light!  And yet there was nothing there but a horrible skeleton of dead bones, while I—!

I stopped with a shudder, and turned back into the room.  I wished that Alan had not told me what lay under the stone; I wished that I had never asked him.  It was a ghastly thing to think about, and spoilt all the beauty of the night to me.

I got quickly into bed, and soon dropped asleep.  I do not know how long I slept; but when I woke it was with the consciousness again of that haunting wind.