moonlight on the
bank they laid her, who for all their efforts never stirred. . . . There
she lay all white, and they two crouched at her head and feet--like dark
creatures of the woods and waters over that which with their hunting they
had slain.

How long they stayed there, not once looking at each other, not once
speaking, not once ceasing to touch with their hands that dead thing--he
never knew. How long in the summer night, with its moonlight and its
shadows quivering round them, and the night wind talking in the reeds!

And then the most enduring of all sentient things had moved in him again;
so that he once more felt. . . . Never again to see those eyes that had
loved him with their light! Never again to kiss her lips! Frozen--like
moonlight to the earth, with the flower still clinging at her breast.
Thrown out on the bank like a plucked water-lily! Dead? No, no! Not
dead! Alive in the night--alive to him--somewhere! Not on this dim
bank, in this hideous backwater, with that dark dumb creature who had
destroyed her! Out there on the river--in the wood of their
happiness--somewhere alive! . . . And, staggering up past Cramier, who
never moved, he got into his boat, and like one demented pulled out into
the stream.

But once there in the tide, he fell huddled forward, motionless above his
oars. . . .

And the moonlight flooded his dark skiff drifting down. And the
moonlight effaced the ripples on the water that had stolen away her
spirit. Her spirit mingled now with the white beauty and the shadows,
for ever part of the stillness and the passion of a summer night;
hovering, floating, listening to the rustle of the reeds, and the
whispering of the woods; one with the endless dream--that spirit passing
out, as all might wish to pass, in the hour of happiness.

PART III

AUTUMN

I

When on that November night Lennan stole to the open door of his
dressing-room, and stood watching his wife asleep, Fate still waited for
an answer.

A low fire was burning--one of those fires that throw faint shadows
everywhere, and once and again glow so that some object shines for a
moment, some shape is clearly seen. The curtains were not quite drawn,
and a plane-tree branch with leaves still hanging, which had kept them
company all the fifteen years they had lived there, was moving darkly in
the wind, now touching the glass with a frail tap, as though asking of
him, who had been roaming in that wind so