Wilfrid locked her fingers in a strong pressure, and walked on, silent as a man who has faced one of the veiled mysteries of life.  It struck a full human blow on his heart, dragging him out of his sentimental pastures precipitately.  He felt her fainting voice to be the intensest love-cry that could be uttered.  The sound of it coursed through his blood, striking a rare illumination of sparks in his not commonly brilliant brain.  In truth, that little episode showed an image of nature weak with the burden of new love.  I do not charge the young cavalry officer with the power of perceiving images.  He saw no more than that she could not sing because of what was in her heart toward him; but such a physical revelation was a divine love-confession, coming involuntarily from one whose lips had not formed the name of love; and Wilfrid felt it so deeply, that the exquisite flattery was almost lost, in a certain awed sense of his being in the presence of an absolute fact:  a thing real, though it was much talked about, and visible, though it did not wear a hat or a petticoat.

It searched him thoroughly enough to keep him from any further pledges in that direction, propitious as the moment was, while the moon slipped over banks of marble into fields of blue, and all the midnight promised silence.  They passed quickly through the laurel shrubs, and round the lawn.  Lights were in the sleepless ladies’ bed-room windows.

“Do I love her?” thought Wilfrid, as he was about to pull at the bell, and the thought that he should feel pain at being separated from her for half-a-dozen hours, persuaded him that he did.  The self-restraint which withheld him from protesting that he did, confirmed it.

“To-morrow morning,” he whispered.

“I shall be down by daylight,” answered Emilia.

“You are in the shade—­I cannot see you,” said he.

The door opened as Emilia was moving out of the line of shadow.

CHAPTER XIII

On the morrow Wilfrid was gone.  No one had seen him go.  Emilia, while she touched the keys of a muted piano softly in the morning quiet of the house, had heard the front-door close.  At that hour one attributes every noise to the servants.  She played on and waited patiently, till the housemaid expelled her into the dewy air.

The report from his bedchamber, telling the ladies of his absence, added that he had taken linen for a lengthened journey.

This curious retreat of my hero belongs to the order of things that are done ‘None know why;’ a curtain which drops conveniently upon either the bewilderment of the showman or the infirmities of the puppet.

I must own (though I need not be told what odium frowns on such a pretension to excess of cleverness) that I do know why.  I know why, and, unfortunately for me, I have to tell what I know.  If I do not tell, this narrative is so constituted that there will be no moral to it.