They played cards till the children were sent off to bed; then Stella went to the piano.  From over on the window seat, where it was nearly dark, Ashurst watched her between the candles—­that fair head on the long, white neck bending to the movement of her hands.  She played fluently, without much expression; but what a Picture she made, the faint golden radiance, a sort of angelic atmosphere hovering about her!  Who could have passionate thoughts or wild desires in the presence of that swaying, white-clothed girl with the seraphic head?  She played a thing of Schumann’s called “Warum?” Then Halliday brought out a flute, and the spell was broken.  After this they made Ashurst sing, Stella playing him accompaniments from a book of Schumann songs, till, in the middle of “Ich grolle nicht,” two small figures clad in blue dressing-gowns crept in and tried to conceal themselves beneath the piano.  The evening broke up in confusion, and what Sabina called “a splendid rag.”

That night Ashurst hardly slept at all.  He was thinking, tossing and turning.  The intense domestic intimacy of these last two days, the strength of this Halliday atmosphere, seemed to ring him round, and make the farm and Megan—­even Megan—­seem unreal.  Had he really made love to her—­really promised to take her away to live with him?  He must have been bewitched by the spring, the night, the apple blossom!  This May madness could but destroy them both!  The notion that he was going to make her his mistress—­that simple child not yet eighteen—­now filled him with a sort of horror, even while it still stung and whipped his blood.  He muttered to himself:  “It’s awful, what I’ve done—­awful!” And the sound of Schumann’s music throbbed and mingled with his fevered thoughts, and he saw again Stella’s cool, white, fair-haired figure and bending neck, the queer, angelic radiance about her.  ’I must have been—­I must be-mad!’ he thought.  ‘What came into me?  Poor little Megan!’ “God bless us all, and Mr. Ashes!” “I want to be with you—­only to be with you!” And burying his face in his pillow, he smothered down a fit of sobbing.  Not to go back was awful!  To go back—­more awful still!

Emotion, when you are young, and give real vent to it, loses its power of torture.  And he fell asleep, thinking:  ’What was it—­a few kisses—­all forgotten in a month!’

Next morning he got his cheque cashed, but avoided the shop of the dove-grey dress like the plague; and, instead, bought himself some necessaries.  He spent the whole day in a queer mood, cherishing a kind of sullenness against himself.  Instead of the hankering of the last two days, he felt nothing but a blank—­all passionate longing gone, as if quenched in that outburst of tears.  After tea Stella put a book down beside him, and said shyly: 

“Have you read that, Frank?”

It was Farrar’s “Life of Christ.”  Ashurst smiled.  Her anxiety about his beliefs seemed to him comic, but touching.  Infectious too, perhaps, for he began to have an itch to justify himself, if not to convert her.  And in the evening, when the children and Halliday were mending their shrimping nets, he said: