g"? She felt as if
eons had passed over her, as if the solitude of ages wrapped her round;
and yet afar off, like dream music in her soul, she still heard its
echoes pulsing across the desert. It held her like a charm.

Slowly her tears passed. There came again to her that curious sense of
something drawing her, almost as of a voice that called. The garden lay
still and mysterious in the moonlight. She caught its gleam upon a
corner of the lake where it shone like a wedge of silver.

A few seconds she stood irresolute; then without word or backward glance
she stepped down into the magic silence.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAST ORDEAL

What impulse she obeyed she knew not; only she wanted to hear the
nightingale, to drink in the fragrance, to feel the healing balm upon her
heart. Her feet carried her noiselessly over the grass to that shining
splendour of water, and turned along the path that led past the seat
under the cedar where Nap had joined her on that evening that seemed
already far away, and had told her that he loved her still. By this path
he and Bertie would have gone to the Dower House; by this path he would
probably return alone.

Her heart quickened a little as she passed into the deep shadow. She was
not nervous as a rule, but there was something mysterious about the
place, something vaguely disquieting. The gurgle of the stream that fed
the lake sounded curiously remote.

She turned towards the rustic seat on which she had rested that day, and
on the instant her pulses leapt to sudden alarm. There was a stealthy
movement in front of her; a crouching object that looked monstrous in the
gloom detached itself from the shadow and began to move away. For a
moment she thought it was some animal; then there came to her the
unmistakable though muffled tread of human feet, and swift as an arrow
comprehension pierced her. The thing in front of her was Tawny Hudson.

But why was he skulking there? Why did he seek thus to avoid her? What
was the man doing? The agitated questions raced through her brain at
lightning speed, and after them came a horrible, a sickening suspicion.

Whence it arose she could not have said, but the memory of Nap's face
only half an hour before, when Tawny Hudson had been under discussion,
arose in her mind and confirmed it almost before she knew that it was
there. She had often suspected the half-breed of harbouring a dislike for
Nap. More often still she had noted Nap's complete