that night, when the last echoes of the village street had died away, and the purple and grey of the summer twilight was dissolving into the deep blue and gold of night, sprats knelt at the open window of her bedroom, staring out upon the valley with eyes that saw nothing. she was thinking and wondering, and for the first time in her life she wished that a mother’s heart and a mother’s arms were at hand—she wanted to hear the beating love of the one and feel the protecting strength of the other.

something had come to her that afternoon as she strove to comfort lucian. the episode of the duel; lucian’s white face and burning eyes as he bowed to the cynical, polite old nobleman and strode out of the hall with the dignity and grace of a great prince; the agony which had exhausted itself in her own arms; the resolution with which he had at last choked everything down, and had risen up and shaken himself as if he were a dog that throws off the last drop of water;—all these things had opened the door into a new world for the girl who had seen them. she had been lucian’s other self; his constant companion, his faithful mentor, for three years; it was not until now that she began to realise him. she saw now that he was no ordinary human being, and that as long as he lived he would never be amenable to ordinary rules. he was now a child in years, and he had the heart of a man; soon he would be a man, and he would still be a child. he would be a child all his life—self-willed, obstinate, proud, generous, wayward; he would sin as a child sins, and suffer as a child suffers; and there would always be something of wonder in him that either sin or suffering should come to him. when she felt his head within her protecting and consoling arm, sprats recognised{86} the weakness and helplessness which lay in lucian’s soul—he was the child that has fallen and runs to its mother for consolation. she recognised, too, that hers was the stronger nature, the more robust character, and that the strange, mysterious something that ordains all things, had brought her life and lucian’s together so that she might give help where help was needed. all their lives—all through the strange mystic to come into which her eyes were trying to look as she stared out into the splendour of the summer night—she and lucian were to be as they had been that evening; her breast the harbour of his soul. he might drift away; he might suffer shipwreck; but he must come home at last, and whether he came early or late his place must be ready for him.

this was knowledge—this was calm certainty: it changed the child into the woman. she knelt down at the window to say her prayers, still staring out into the night, and now she saw the stars and the deep blue of the sky, and she heard the murmur of the river in the valley. her prayers took no form of words, and were all the deeper for it; underneath their wordless aspiration ran the solemn undercurrent of the new-born knowledge that she loved lucian with a love that would last till death.