murmured, barely above his
breath--and waited; expecting he knew not what.

A ghost of a breeze passed close to him;--truly a ghost, for the night
was dead still. Almost he could have sworn that if he put out a hand he
would have touched her. But reverence withheld him, rather than fear.

And the next moment, the place was empty. He was alone....

He felt the emptiness as unmistakably as he had felt her presence. But
the pang of her going was shot through with elation that at last his
waking brain had knowledge of her--a knowledge that no man could wrest
from him, even if she never so came again. He had done her bidding. He
had kept his manhood pure and the windows of his soul clear--and,
behold, the Light _had_ shone through....

* * * *

Impossible to tell how long he stood there. In those few moments of
intensified life, time was not. The ordinary sense of his surroundings
faded. The inner sense of reality quickened in like measure; the reality
of her presence, all the more felt, because it was unseen....

When he came clearly to himself again, the moon had vanished. Eastward,
the sky was full of primrose light. It deepened and blazed; till, all in
a moment, the sun leaped from the scabbard of the hills, keen and
radiant as a drawn sword.

A full minute Roy stood there, eyes and brain blinded with brilliance.
Then he knelt down and covered his face; and so remained, a long while,
his whole being uplifted in a wordless ecstasy of thanksgiving.

CHAPTER IV.

"The snow upon my life-bloom sits
And sheds a dreary blight;--
Thy spirit o'er my spirit flits,
And crimson comes for white."
--ANON.

On an unclouded afternoon of October, Roy sat alone with Thea Leigh in a
shady corner of the Residency garden, smoking and talking, feeling
blissfully at ease in body, and very much at home in spirit. After the
wrench of parting with Desmond, it was balm to be welcomed by the sister
who shared his high courage and enthusiasm for life, and who was smiling
at Roy now with the same hazel-grey eyes that both had gotten from their
father. But Thea's hair--her crown of glory--belonged exclusively to
herself. The colour of it reminded him, with a pang, of autumn beech
leaves, in his own woods. It enhanced the vivid quality of her beauty,
and added appreciably to his pleasure in watching her while she talked.

Roy had arrived that morning, in the mist-laden