eve felt very restless that evening, and with seeming illogicality went up to her room at the old-time hour of nine.

the day had been close and sultry, and the bedroom still felt hot after the hours of scorching sunlight on the tiles. eve drew the curtains back, and opened the casement to its widest, for the upper windows were still fitted with the old lead-lights. the sill was deep, nearly a foot and a half broad, and eve half lay and half leant upon it while the night air streamed in.

and what a night! all jet and silver; for the moon was up over the fir woods, just as on the night when her mother died. the stillness was the stillness of a dawn where no birds sing. the nightingale had long been mute, and the nightjar preferred the oak woods in the clayland valleys. eve’s ears could not snatch a single sound out of that vast motionless landscape, with its black woods and mysterious horizons.

the silence made her feel lonely, eerily lonely, like a sensitive child lost in a wood. she remembered how she had started awake at night sometimes, terrified by this horror of loneliness, and crying out “mother, mother!” it was absurd that the grown woman should feel like the child, and yet she found herself hungering for that little placid figure with its boring commonplaces and amiable soft face. what a prig she had been! she had let that spirit of superiority grow in her, forgetting that the hands that were always knitting those foolish woollen superfluities had held and comforted her as a child. now, in the white heat of an emotional ordeal, she missed the nearness of that commonplace affection. what a mistake it was to be too clever; for when the heart ached, one’s cleverness stood by like a dreary pedagogue, helpless and dumb.

the stillness! she wished those dim stars would send down astral rain, and patter on this roof of silence. the sound of dripping water would be welcome. yes, and those latimer fountains, were they still murmuring under the cypresses, or did not the spirit of sage economy turn off the water-cocks and shut down the sluices? life! it, too, was so often a shutting down of sluices. the deep waters had to be tamed, dammed back, kept from pouring forth as they desired. modern conventional life was like a canal with its system of locks. there were no rapids, no freshets, no impetuous cataracts. you went up, steadily, respectably, lock by lock; you came down steadily, and perhaps just as respectably. in between was the gliding monotony of the long stretches between artificial banks, with either a religious tow-rope or a puffing philosopher to draw you.

she suffered on account of the stillness and this atmosphere of isolation, and yet the nearness of some very human incident was as a stabbing pain compared to a dull ache. leaning there over the window-sill, with the moonlight glimmering on the lozenged glass in the lattices, she knew that she was looking towards fernhill and all that it represented. lynette, the child; the great gardens, that wide, free spacious, colour-filled life; canterton’s comradeship, and even more than that. the whole future quivered on one sensitive thread. a breeze could shake it away as a wind shakes a dewdrop from the web of a spider.

she told herself that canterton must have realised by now the impossible nature of the position he was asking her to assume. if he only would go back to the yesterday of a month ago, and let that happy, workaday life return! but then, would she herself be content with that? she had sipped the wine of tristan and isoult, and the magic of it was in her blood.

her thoughts had come to this point, when something startled her. she had heard the latch of the gate click. there was a man’s figure standing in the shade of a holly that grew close to the fence.

eve was not conscious of any fear, only of an intense curiosity—a desire to know whether she was on the brink of some half foreseen crisis. it might be a tramp, it might be the man who came courting her girl anne; but anne had gone to bed with a headache an hour before eve had come to her own room.

in spite of these other possibilities, she felt prophetically convinced that it was canterton. she did not move away from the window, knowing that the man, whoever he was, must have seen the outline of her head and shoulders against the light within. her heart was beating faster. she could feel it as she leant with her bosom pressing upon the window-sill.

she knew canterton the moment he moved out into the moonlight, and, crossing the grass, came and stood under her window. he was bareheaded, and his face, as he looked up at her, gave her an impression of pallid and passionate obstinacy.

“i had to come!”

she felt a flutter of exultation, but it was the exultation of tragedy.

“madman!”

“no, i am not mad. it is the sanest moment of my life.”

“then all the rest of the world is mad. supposing—supposing the girl is still awake. supposing——oh, there are a hundred such suppositions! you risk them, and make me risk them.”

“because i am so sure of myself. i take the risk to promise you a homage that shall be inviolate. am i a fool? do you think that i have no self-control—that i shall ever cause this most spiritual thing to be betrayed? i tell you i can live this life. i can make it possible for you to live it.”

eve raised herself on her elbows, and seemed to be listening. there was the same stillness everywhere, the stillness that had been broken by canterton’s voice.

she leant out and spoke to him in an undertone.

“i will come down. i suppose i must let you say all that you have to say.”

she put out the light and felt her way out of the room and down the stairs into the hall. her brain felt as clear as the sky out yonder, though the turmoil in her heart might have been part of the darkness through which she passed. unlocking and unbolting the door, she found canterton waiting.

“you are making me do this mad thing.”

she had not troubled to put on a hat, and her face was white and clear and unhidden. its air of desperate and purposeful frankness struck him. her eyes looked straight at his, steadily and unflinchingly, with no subtle glances, no cunning of the lids.

“let’s go down to the woods. come!”

she spoke as though she had taken command of the crisis, snatched it out of his strong hands. and canterton obeyed her. they went down the lane in the high shadow of the hedgerows and across the main road into the fir woods, neither of them uttering a word.

eve paused when they had gone some two hundred yards into the woods. the canopy of boughs was a black vaulting, with here and there a crevice where the moonlight entered to fall in streaks and splashes upon the tree trunks and the ground. on every side were the crowding fir boles that blotted out the distance and obscured each other. the woodland floor was covered deep with pine needles, and from somewhere came the smell of bracken.

“now, let me hear everything.”

he appeared a little in awe of her, and for the moment she was the stronger.

“i have told you all that there is to tell. i want you to be the bigger part of my life—the inward life that not another soul knows.”

“not even lynette?”

“she is but a child.”

eve began to walk to and fro, and canterton kept pace with her.

“let’s be practical. let’s be cold, and sure of things. you want me to be a spiritual wife to you, and a spiritual mother to lynette?”

“yes.”

“and you think you can live such a life?”

“i know i can.”

she was smiling, the strange, ironical, half-exultant smile of a love that is not blind.

“you are sure of yourself. let me ask you a question. are you sure of me?”

he looked at her searchingly in the dim light.

“eve, i am not vain enough to ask you whether——”

“whether i care?”

“you have said it.”

she paused, gazing at the ground.

“is a man so much slower than a woman?”

“sometimes one does not dare to think——”

“but the woman knows without daring.”

he stood silently before her, full of that devout wonder that had made him such a watcher in nature’s world.

“then, surely, child——”

her face and eyes flashed up to him, and her hands quivered.

“don’t call me child! haven’t you realised that i am a woman?”

“the one woman.”

“there, it is all so impossible! and you don’t understand.”

he spoke gently, almost humbly.

“why is it impossible? what is it that i don’t understand?”

“oh, dear man, must i show you everything? this is why it is impossible.”

her arms went out and were round his neck. her mouth was close to his. in the taking of a breath she had kissed him, and he had returned the kiss, and his arms were round her.

“jim, don’t you understand now? i care too much. that is why it is impossible.”