its fields to the wanderer when again
he dared it alone.

Alban remembered one night above all others of this strange seclusion,
and that was a night of a woman's humiliation. There had been great
bustle all day, the coming of oarsmen and of coaches to Henley, and all
the aquatic renaissance which prefaces the great regatta. Their own
cottage, lying just above the bridge with a shady garden extending to
the water's edge, was no longer the place apart that it had been.
Strangers now anchored a little way from their boat-house and consumed
monstrous packets of sandwiches and the contents of abundant bottles.
There were house-boats being tugged up and down the river, little groups
of rowing men upon the bridge all day, the music of banjos by night, and
lanterns glowing in the darkness. Anna watched this pretty scene as one
who would really take a young girl's part in it. She simulated an
interest in the rowing about which she knew nothing at all--visited the
house-boats of such of her friends as had come down for the regatta, and
was, in Willy Forrest's words, as "skittish as a two-year-old that had
slipped its halter." Forrest had been to and fro from the stable near
Winchester on several occasions. "He comes to tell me that I am about to
lose a fortune, and I am beginning to hate him," Anna said; and on this
occasion she enjoyed that diverting and unaccustomed recreation known as
speaking the truth.

There had been such a visit as this upon the morning of the day when
Anna spoke intimately to Alban of his future and her own. Her mood now
abandoned itself utterly to her purpose. The close intimacy of these
quiet days had brought her to the point where a real if momentary
passion compelled her to desire this boy's love as she had never desired
anything in all her life. To bring him to that declaration she sought so
ardently, to feel his kisses upon her lips, to play the young lover's
part if it were but for a day, to this folly her vanity had driven her.
And now the opportunities for words were not denied. She had spent the
afternoon in the backwaters up by Shiplake; there had been a little
dinner afterwards with the old crone who served them so usefully as
chaperone--a dependent who had eyes but did not see, ears which, as she
herself declared, "would think scorn to listen." Amiable dame, she was
in bed by nine o'clock, while Alban and Anna were lying in a punt at the
water's edge, listening to the music of a distant gu