m crying out.
And another thought came to him: I shall have to go about with this
feeling, day and night, and keep it secret.

They were saying good-night; and he had to smirk and smile, and
pretend--to her above all--that he was happy, and he could see that she
knew it was pretence.

Then he was alone, with the feeling that he had failed her at the first
shot; torn, too, between horror of what he suddenly saw before him, and
longing to be back in her presence at any cost. . . . And all this on the
day of that first kiss which had seemed to him to make her so utterly his
own.

He sat down on a bench facing the Casino. Neither the lights, nor the
people passing in and out, not even the gipsy bandsmen's music,
distracted his thoughts for a second. Could it be less than twenty-four
hours since he had picked up her handkerchief, not thirty yards away? In
that twenty-four hours he seemed to have known every emotion that man
could feel. And in all the world there was now not one soul to whom he
could speak his real thoughts--not even to her, because from her, beyond
all, he must keep at any cost all knowledge of his unhappiness. So this
was illicit love--as it was called! Loneliness, and torture! Not
jealousy--for her heart was his; but amazement, outrage, fear. Endless
lonely suffering! And nobody, if they knew, would care, or pity him one
jot!

Was there really, then, as the ancients thought, a Daemon that liked to
play with men, as men liked to stir an earwig and turn it over and put a
foot on it in the end?

He got up and made his way towards the railway-station. There was the
bench where she had been sitting when he came on her that very morning.
The stars in their courses had seemed to fight for them then; but whether
for joy he no longer knew. And there on the seat were still the pepper
berries she had crushed and strewn. He broke off another bunch and
bruised them. That scent was the ghost of sacred minutes when her hand
lay against his own. The stars in their courses--for joy or sorrow!

VII

There was no peace now for Colonel and Mrs. Ercott. They felt themselves
conspirators, and of conspiracy they had never had the habit. Yet how
could they openly deal with anxieties which had arisen solely from what
they had chanced secretly to see? What was not intended for one's eyes
and ears did not exist; no canon of conduct could be quite so sacred. As
well defend the opening of another person's l