trees, with wide
lands beside it sloping to the water.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Beaulieu," he replied. "It was built in the seventeenth century, I
believe, and must have been a fascinating place in colonial days." He
drove in between the fences and tied the horse, and came around by the
side of the runabout. "Won't you get out and look at it?"

She hesitated, and their eyes met as he held out his hand, but she
avoided it and leaped quickly to the ground neither spoke as they walked
around the deserted house and gazed at the quaint facade, broken by a
crumbling, shaded balcony let in above the entrance door. No sound broke
the stillness of the summer's day--a pregnant stillness. The air
was heavy with perfumes, and the leaves formed a tracery against the
marvellous blue of the sky. Mystery brooded in the place. Here, in this
remote paradise now in ruins, people had dwelt and loved. Thought ended
there; and feeling, which is unformed thought, began. Again she glanced
at him, and again their eyes met, and hers faltered. They turned, as
with one consent, down the path toward the distant water. Paradise
overgrown! Could it be reconstructed, redeemed?

In former days the ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of
the house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest. Trees grew out of the
flower beds now, and underbrush choked the paths. The box itself, that
once primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless. Labyrinth
had replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance. At length, in
the deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old
terrace, to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling too, the shutters
off their hinges, the floor-boards loose. Past and gone were the idyls
of which it had been the stage.

They turned to the left, through tangled box that wound hither and
thither, until they stopped at a stone wall bordering a tree-arched
lane. At the bottom of the lane was a glimpse of blue water.

Honora sat down on the wall with her back to a great trunk. Chiltern,
with a hand on the stones, leaped over lightly, and stood for some
moments in the lane, his feet a little apart and firmly planted, his
hands behind his back.

What had Thalia been about to allow the message of that morning to creep
into her comedy? a message announcing the coming of an intruder not in
the play, in the person of a husband bearing gifts. What right had he,
in the eternal essence of things, to return? He was out