was interest, whose idiosyncrasy blended with accident to make a completing and predominant harmony for their predestined lovers.  They were the essential thing in life.  Without them the fine brave show of the rejuvenated world was a caparisoned steed without a rider, a bowl without a flower, a theater without a play. . . .  And to me that night of Beltane, it was as clear as white flames that Nettie, and Nettie alone, roused those harmonies in me.  And she had gone!  I had sent her from me; I knew not whither she had gone.  I had in my first virtuous foolishness cut her out of my life for ever!

So I saw it then, and I lay unseen in the darkness and called upon Nettie, and wept for her, lay upon my face and wept for her, while the glad people went to and fro, and the smoke streamed thick across the distant stars, and the red reflections, the shadows and the fluctuating glares, danced over the face of the world.

No! the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed, from habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse imaginings, but from the passions of love it had not freed us.  It had but brought the lord of life, Eros, to his own.  All through the long sorrow of that night I, who had rejected him, confessed his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets. . . .

I cannot give the remotest guess of when I rose up, nor of my tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires, nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went streaming home between three and four, to resume their lives, swept and garnished, stripped and clean.  But at dawn, when the ashes of the world’s gladness were ceasing to glow—­it was a bleak dawn that made me shiver in my thin summer clothes—­I came across a field to a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths.  A queer sense of familiarity arrested my steps, and I stood puzzled.  Then I was moved to go a dozen paces from the path, and at once a singularly misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory.  This was the place!  Here I had stood, there I had placed my old kite, and shot with my revolver, learning to use it, against the day when I should encounter Verrall.

Kite and revolver had gone now, and all my hot and narrow past, its last vestiges had shriveled and vanished in the whirling gusts of the Beltane fires.  So I walked through a world of gray ashes at last, back to the great house in which the dead, deserted image of my dear lost mother lay.

Section 3

I came back to Lowchester House very tired, very wretched; exhausted by my fruitless longing for Nettie.  I had no thought of what lay before me.

A miserable attraction drew me into the great house to look again on the stillness that had been my mother’s face, and as I came into that room, Anna, who had been sitting by the open window, rose to meet me.  She had the air of one who waits.  She, too, was pale with watching; all night she had watched between the dead within and the Beltane fires abroad, and longed for my coming.  I stood mute between her and the bedside. . . .