Alison, while repudiating the notion that an escort were needed in a neighbourhood of such propriety and peace, had not refused his offer to accompany her.  And Hodder felt instinctively, as he took his place beside her, a sense of climax.  This situation, like those of the past, was not of his own making.  It was here; confronting him, and a certain inevitable intoxication at being once, more alone with her prevented him from forming any policy with which to deal with it.  He might either trust himself, or else he might not.  And as she said, the distance was not great.  But he could not help wondering, during those first moments of silence, whether she comprehended the strength of the temptation to which she subjected him . . . .

The night was warm.  She wore a coat, which was open, and from time to time he caught the gleam of the moonlight on the knotted pearls at her throat.  Over her head she had flung, mantilla-like, a black lace scarf, the effect of which was, in the soft luminosity encircling her, to add to the quality of mystery never exhausted.  If by acquiescing in his company she had owned to a tie between them, the lace shawl falling over the tails of her dark hair and framing in its folds her face, had somehow made her once more a stranger.  Nor was it until she presently looked up into his face with a smile that this impression was, if not at once wholly dissipated, at least contradicted.

Her question, indeed, was intimate.

“Why did you come with me?”

“Why?” he repeated, taken aback.

“Yes.  I’m sure you have something you wish to do, something which particularly worries you.”

“No,” he answered, appraising her intuition of him, “there is nothing I can do, to-night.  A young woman in whom Mr. Bentley is interested, in whom I am interested, has disappeared.  But we have taken all the steps possible towards finding her.”

“It was nothing—­more serious, then?  That, of course, is serious enough.  Nothing, I mean, directly affecting your prospects of remaining—­where you are?”

“No,” he answered.  He rejoiced fiercely that she should have asked him.  The question was not bold, but a natural resumption of the old footing “Not that I mean to imply,” he added, returning her smile, “that those prospects’ are in any way improved.”

“Are they any worse?” she said.

“I see the bishop to-morrow.  I have no idea what position he will take.  But even if he should decide not to recommend me for trial many difficult problems still remain to be solved.”

“I know.  It’s fine,” she continued, after a moment, “the way you are going ahead as if there were no question of your not remaining; and getting all those people into the church and influencing them as you did when they had come for all sorts of reasons.  Do you remember, the first time I met you, I told you I could not think of you as a clergyman.  I cannot now—­less than ever.”