ou know."

Neeld started and looked at her with obvious excitement. She repaid his
stare with one of equal intensity.

"Why, you don't think----?" she began in amazement.

"Come, Neeld, we're waiting for you," cried Iver from the wagonette,
while Bob in irrepressible spirits burst into song as he gathered up the
reins. He had deposed the coachman and had Janie with him on the box.

They drove off, waving their hands and shouting good-night. Mina ran a
little way after them and saw Neeld turning his head this way and that,
as though he thought there might be something to see. When she returned
she found Gainsborough saying good-night to his daughter; at the same
moment the lights in the Long Gallery were put out. Cecily slipped her
arm through hers and they walked out again into the garden. After three
or four minutes the wagonette, having made the circuit necessary to
reach the carriage-bridge, drove by on the road across the river, with
more waving of hands and shouts of good-night. An absolute stillness
came as the noise of its wheels died away.

"I've got through that all right," said Cecily with a laugh, drawing her
friend with her toward the bridge. "I suppose I shall be quite
accustomed to it soon."

They went on to the bridge and halted in the middle of it, by a common
impulse as it seemed.

"The sound of a river always says to me that it all doesn't matter
much," Cecily went on, leaning on the parapet. "I believe that's been
expressed more poetically!"

"It's great nonsense, however it's expressed," observed Mina scornfully.

"I sometimes feel as if it was true." Probably Cecily thought that
nobody--no girl--no girl in love--had ever had the feeling before. A
delusive appearance of novelty is one of the most dangerous weapons of
Cupid. But Mina was an experienced woman--had been married too!

"Don't talk stuff, my dear," she cried crossly. "And why are we standing
on this horrid little bridge?"

She turned round; Cecily still gazed in melancholy abstraction into the
stream. Cecily, then, faced down the valley, Mina looked up it; and at
the moment the moon showed a quarter of her face and illuminated a
streak of the Fillingford road.

The man was there. He was there again. The moonlight fell on his face.
He smiled at Mina, pointed a hand toward Blentmouth, and smiled again.
He seemed to mock the ignorance of the vanished wagonette. Mina made no
sign. He laid his finger on his lips, and nodded slight