“Perhaps it was as well, then, that I said nothing.  Poetry must come of itself, without praise—­don’t you think?”

“Yes, I lived it—­or tried to live it—­instead of putting it into metre.”

“That’s exactly what I once heard my father say about himself.  And he called it consuming his own smoke.”

Piers could not but join in her quiet laugh, yet he had never felt a moment less opportune for laughter.  As if to prove that she purposely changed the note of their dialogue, Irene reached a volume from the table, and said in the most matter-of-fact voice: 

“Here’s a passage of Tolstoi that I can’t make out.  Be my professor, please.  First of all, let me hear you read it aloud for the accent.”

The lesson continued till Helen entered the room again.  Irene so willed it.

CHAPTER XXXVI

She sat by her open window, which looked over the dale to the long high ridge of moors, softly drawn against a moonlit sky.  Far below sounded the rushing Ure, and at moments there came upon the fitful breeze a deeper music, that of the falls at Aysgarth, miles away.  It was an hour since she had bidden good-night to Helen, and two hours or more since all else in the Castle and in the cottages had been still and dark.  She loved this profound quiet, this solitude guarded by the eternal powers of nature.  She loved the memories and imaginings borne upon the stillness of these grey old towers.

The fortress of warrior-lords, the prison of a queen, the Royalist refuge—­fallen now into such placid dreaminess of age.  Into the dark chamber above, desolate, legend-haunted, perchance in some moment of the night there fell through the narrow window-niche a pale moonbeam, touching the floor, the walls of stone; such light in gloom as may have touched the face of Mary herself, wakeful with her recollections and her fears.  Musing it in her fancy, Irene thought of love and death.

Had it come to her at length, that love which was so strange and distant when, in ignorance, she believed it her companion?  Verses in her mind, verses that would never be forgotten, however lightly she held them, sang and rang to a new melody.  They were not poetry—­ said he who wrote them.  Yet they were truth, sweetly and nobly uttered.  The false, the trivial, does not so cling to memory year after year.

They had helped her to know him, these rhyming lines, or so she fancied.  They shaped in her mind, slowly, insensibly, an image of the man, throughout the lapse of time when she neither saw him nor heard of him.  Whether a true image how should she assure herself?  She only knew that no feature of it seemed alien when compared with the impression of those two last days.  Yet the picture was an ideal; the very man she could honour, love; he and no other.  Did she perilously deceive herself in thinking that this ideal and the man who spoke with her, were one?