tly what I once heard my father say about himself. And he
called it consuming his own smoke."

Piers could not but join in her quiet laugh, yet he had never felt a
moment less opportune for laughter. As if to prove that she purposely
changed the note of their dialogue, Irene reached a volume from the
table, and said in the most matter-of-fact voice:

"Here's a passage of Tolstoi that I can't make out. Be my professor,
please. First of all, let me hear you read it aloud for the accent."

The lesson continued till Helen entered the room again. Irene so willed
it.

CHAPTER XXXVI

She sat by her open window, which looked over the dale to the long high
ridge of moors, softly drawn against a moonlit sky. Far below sounded
the rushing Ure, and at moments there came upon the fitful breeze a
deeper music, that of the falls at Aysgarth, miles away. It was an hour
since she had bidden good-night to Helen, and two hours or more since
all else in the Castle and in the cottages had been still and dark. She
loved this profound quiet, this solitude guarded by the eternal powers
of nature. She loved the memories and imaginings borne upon the
stillness of these grey old towers.

The fortress of warrior-lords, the prison of a queen, the Royalist
refuge--fallen now into such placid dreaminess of age. Into the dark
chamber above, desolate, legend-haunted, perchance in some moment of
the night there fell through the narrow window-niche a pale moonbeam,
touching the floor, the walls of stone; such light in gloom as may have
touched the face of Mary herself, wakeful with her recollections and
her fears. Musing it in her fancy, Irene thought of love and death.

Had it come to her at length, that love which was so strange and
distant when, in ignorance, she believed it her companion? Verses in
her mind, verses that would never be forgotten, however lightly she
held them, sang and rang to a new melody. They were not poetry--said he
who wrote them. Yet they were truth, sweetly and nobly uttered. The
false, the trivial, does not so cling to memory year after year.

They had helped her to know him, these rhyming lines, or so she
fancied. They shaped in her mind, slowly, insensibly, an image of the
man, throughout the lapse of time when she neither saw him nor heard of
him. Whether a true image how should she assure herself? She only knew
that no feature of it seemed alien when compared with the impression of
those two last days. Yet t