As they drove on to the bridge at Aysgarth, Piers Otway stood there awaiting them.  They exchanged few words; the picture before their eyes, and the wild music that filled the air, imposed silence.  Headlong between its high banks plunged the swollen torrent, the roaring spate; brown from its washing of the peaty moorland, and churned into flying flakes of foam.  Over the worn ledges, at other times a succession of little waterfalls, rolled in resistless fury a mighty cataract; at great rocks in mid-channel it leapt with surges like those of an angry sea.  The spectacle was fascinating in its grandeur, appalling in its violence; with the broad leafage of the glen arched over it in warm, still sunshine, wondrously beautiful.

They wandered some way by the river banks; then drove to other spots of which Otway spoke, lunched at a village inn, and by four o’clock returned altogether to the Castle.  After tea, Piers found himself alone with Irene.  Mrs. Borisoff had left the room whilst he was speaking, and so silently that for a moment he was not aware of her withdrawal.  Alone with Irene, for the first time since he had known her; even at Ewell, long ago, they had never been together without companionship.  There fell a silence.  Piers could not lift his eyes to the face which had all day been before him, the face which seemed more than ever beautiful amid nature’s beauties.  He wished to thank her for the letter she had written him to St. Petersburg, but was fearful of seeming to make too much of this mark of kindness.  Irene herself resumed the conversation.

“You will continue to write for the reviews, I hope?”

“I shall try to,” he answered softly.

“Your Russian must be very idiomatic.  I found it hard in places.”

Overcome with delight, he looked at her and bent towards her.

“Mrs. Borisoff told me you had learnt.  I know what that means—­ learning Russian in England, out of books.  I began to do it at Ewell —­do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember very well.  Have you written anything besides these two articles?”

“Written—­yes, but not published.  I have written all sorts of things.”  His voice shook.  “Even—­verse.”

He repented the word as soon as it was uttered.  Again his eyes could not move towards hers.

“I know you have,” said Irene, in the voice of one who smiles.

“I have never been sure that you knew it—­that you received those verses.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know how to acknowledge them.  I never received the dedication of a poem, before or since, and in my awkwardness I put off my thanks till it was too late to send them.  But I remember the lines; I think they were beautiful.  Shall you ever include them in a volume?”

“I wrote no more, I am no poet.  Yet if you had given a word of praise”—­he laughed, as one does when emotion is too strong—­“I should have written on and on, with a glorious belief in myself.”