nk, acid poison, straight out of my wicked heart----"

"Then empty it; let me drain it, that there may be room for nothing but
love."

"Love is a vaster emptiness--it is only a shadow thrown by ourselves."

"You have proved it so?" he questioned, anxiously. "You have loved?"

"I have loved," she breathed, with a weary accent on the middle word.

There was a long pause while they looked intently into the evening
mists, which were weaving themselves into a veil of purple tissue over
the horizon. A horrible tremor had seized him, and his next words, when
they found voice, came thickly out from the burial place of a sob.

"Was it--was it Rosser?"

She merely bowed her head without looking at him.

He rose mutely, stretched his arms to right and left, drew himself to
full length like some huge dog wakened from slumber, then for some
moments he stood with hands clenched on his stick before he spoke.

"I suppose it must be 'good-bye.'"...

She looked at him dreamily.

"Need it?"

He leapt to her side.

"Do you mean that you do not want me to go--that you would rather I
stayed?"

"Much rather."

"And he?"

"He has ceased to exist for me!"

A torrent of hot blood seemed to burst from Yate's frozen brain, as
watershoots from the glaciers in summer.

"God! have you given him up?"

"I made a misstatement. I should have said _I have ceased to exist for
him_."

"That means that you love him?"

She faced round angrily.

"How dare you suggest such things of me? Do you think that women like I
are made the same as slippers, to wait till footsore wanderers have need
of them? Do you imagine I would waste an eyelash in weeping for milk
wantonly spilt?"

"Yet you cried?" he ventured, very softly.

"I cried from desolation. Can't you understand the loss of the illusion
being more lamentable even than the loss of the reality? Come, let us go
back," she added, "it is growing dark."

They wandered homewards lingeringly. The summer dusk was full of sweet
mystery, of hazy, promising indefinitude; the heath led to the high
road, and from thence they came under the darkness of trees,
copper-beech and acacia trees, which made a fringed avenue along the
back of the Silvers' orchard.

They halted as they reached the wicket. Each longed to express
something, but the something was in so many volumes they could not
decide whence to light on their quotation. At last she said:--

"I feel you are good and loyal and true.