“Good-night!” he said; then suddenly yielding to the emotion which mastered him, he made one swift step to her side—­“You will forgive me, I know!—­you will think of me presently with kindness, and with patience for my old-fashioned ways!—­and you will do me the justice to believe that if I seemed rude to your guests, as you say I was, it was all for your sake!—­because I thought you deserved more respect from them than that they should smoke in your presence,—­and also, because I felt—­I could not help feeling that if your father had been alive he would not have allowed them to do so,—­he would have been too precious of you,—­too careful that nothing of an indecorous or unwomanly nature should ever be associated with you;—­ and—­and—­I spoke as I did because it seemed to me that someone should speak!—­someone of years and authority, who from the point of experience alone, might defend you from the contact of modern vulgarity;—­so—­so—­I said the first words that came to me—­just as your father might have said them!—­yes!—­just as your father might have spoken,—­for you—­you know you seem little more than a child to me!—­I am so much older than you are, God help me!”

Stooping, he caught her hands and kissed them with a passion of which he was entirely unconscious,—­then turned swiftly from her and was gone.

She stood where he had left her, trembling a little, but with a startled radiance in her eyes that made them doubly beautiful.  She was pale to the lips;—­her hands,—­the hands he had kissed, were burning.  Suddenly, on an impulse which she could not have explained to herself, she ran swiftly out of the picture-gallery and into the hall where,—­as the great oaken door stood open to the summer night,—­she could see the whole flower-garlanded square of the Tudor court, gleaming like polished silver in the intense radiance of the moon.  John Walden was walking quickly across it,—­she watched him, and saw him all at once pause near the old stone dial which at this season of the year was almost hidden by the clambering white roses that grew around it.  He took off his hat and passed his hand over his brows with an air of dejection and fatigue,—­the moonlight fell full on the clear contour of his features,—­and she drew herself and her sparkling draperies well back into the deep shadow of the portal lest he should catch a glimpse of her, and, perhaps,—­so seeing her, return—­

“And that would never do!” she thought, with a little tremor of fear running through her which was unaccountably delicious;—­“I’m sure it wouldn’t!—­not to-night!”

The air was very warm and sultry,—­all the windows of the Manor were thrown open for coolness,—­and through those of the drawing-room came the lovely vibrations of Cicely’s pure fresh voice.  She was singing an enchanting melody on which some words of Julian Adderley’s, simple and quaint, without having any claim to particular poetic merit, floated clearly with distinct and perfect enunciation—­