But his face was inscrutable.  Only he talked a little more, and seemed, perhaps, in better spirits than usual; but that is what a stranger could not have noticed, although it is possible that Helen may have done so.

“By the vicarage gate,” she had said, and it was there that he found her.  Behind her lay the dark and silent garden, beyond it the house, with its wide-open drawing-room windows, and the stream of yellow light from the lamp within, lying in a golden streak across the lawn.  She leant over the gate; an archway of greenery, dark in the night’s dim light, was above her head, and clusters of pale, creamy roses hung down about her on every side.

It was that sort of owl’s light that has no distinctness in it, and yet is far removed from darkness.  Vera’s perfect figure, clad in some white, clinging garment that fell about her in thick, heavy folds, stood out with a statue-like clearness against the dark shrubs behind her.  She seemed like some shadowy queen of the night.  Out of the dimness, the clear oval of her perfect face shone pale as the waning moon far away behind the church tower, whilst the dusky veil of her dark hair lost itself vaguely in the shadows, and melted away into the background.  A poet might have hymned her thus, but no painter could have painted her.

And it was thus that he found her.  For the first time for many weary weeks and months he was alone with her; for the first time he could speak to her freely and from his heart.  He knew not what it was that had made her send for him, or why it was that he had come.  He did not remember her note, or that she had said that she had something for him.  All he knew was, that she had sent for him, and that he was with her.

There was the gate between them, but her white soft hands were clasped loosely together over the top of it.  He took them feverishly between his own.

“I am late—­you have waited for me, dear?  Oh, Vera, how glad I am to be with you!”

There was a dangerous tenderness in his voice that frightened her.  She tried to draw away her hands.

“I had something for you, or I should not have sent—­please, Captain Kynaston—­Maurice—­please let my hands go.”

He was alone under the star-flecked heavens with the woman he loved, there was all the witchery of the pale moonlight about her, all the sweet perfumes of the summer night to intensify the fascination of her presence.  There was a nameless glamour in the luminous dimness—­a subtle seduction to the senses in the silence and the solitude; a bird chirruped once among the tangled roses overhead, and a soft, sighing breeze fluttered for one instant amid its long, trailing branches.  And then, God knows how it came to pass, or what madness possessed the man; but suddenly there was no longer any faith, or honour, or truth for him—­nothing on the face of the whole earth but Vera.

He caught her passionately in his arms, and showered upon her lips the maddest, wildest kisses that man ever gave to woman.