She rode forward, flushing.  What dared she say?  Could she speak of her wedding, and betray Miltoun’s presence?  Could she open her mouth at all without rousing painful feeling of some sort?  Then, impatient of indecision, she began: 

“I’m so glad to see you again.  I didn’t know you were still down here.”

“I only came back to England yesterday, and I’m just here to see to the packing of my things.”

“Oh!” murmured Barbara.  “You know what’s happening to me, I suppose?”

Mrs. Noel smiled, looked up, and said:  “I heard last night.  All joy to you!”

A lump rose in Barbara’s throat.

“I’m so glad to have seen you,” she murmured once more; “I expect I ought to be getting on,” and with the word “Good-bye,” gently echoed, she rode away.

But her mood of delight was gone; even the horse Hal seemed to tread unevenly, for all that he was going back to that stable which ever appeared to him desirable ten minutes after he had left it.

Except that her eyes seemed darker, Mrs. Noel had not changed.  If she had shown the faintest sign of self-pity, the girl would never have felt, as she did now, so sorry and upset.

Leaving the stables, she saw that the wind was driving up a huge, white, shining cloud.  “Isn’t it going to be fine after all!” she thought.

Re-entering the house by an old and so-called secret stairway that led straight to the library, she had to traverse that great dark room.  There, buried in an armchair in front of the hearth she saw Miltoun with a book on his knee, not reading, but looking up at the picture of the old Cardinal.  She hurried on, tiptoeing over the soft carpet, holding her breath, fearful of disturbing the queer interview, feeling guilty, too, of her new knowledge, which she did not mean to impart.  She had burnt her fingers once at the flame between them; she would not do so a second time!

Through the window at the far end she saw that the cloud had burst; it was raining furiously.  She regained her bedroom unseen.  In spite of her joy out there on the moor, this last adventure of her girlhood had not been all success; she had again the old sensations, the old doubts, the dissatisfaction which she had thought dead.  Those two!  To shut one’s eyes, and be happy—­was it possible!  A great rainbow, the nearest she had ever seen, had sprung up in the park, and was come to earth again in some fields close by.  The sun was shining out already through the wind-driven bright rain.  Jewels of blue had begun to star the black and white and golden clouds.  A strange white light-ghost of Spring passing in this last violent outburst-painted the leaves of every tree; and a hundred savage hues had come down like a motley of bright birds on moor and fields.