ile
it lasts.'

Cytherea did as she was told, to escape the punishment of further talk;
flung the twining tresses of her long, rich hair over Miss Aldclyffe's
shoulders as directed, and the two ceased conversing, making themselves
up for sleep. Miss Aldclyffe seemed to give herself over to a luxurious
sense of content and quiet, as if the maiden at her side afforded her a
protection against dangers which had menaced her for years; she was soon
sleeping calmly.

2. TWO TO FIVE A.M.

With Cytherea it was otherwise. Unused to the place and circumstances,
she continued wakeful, ill at ease, and mentally distressed. She
withdrew herself from her companion's embrace, turned to the other
side, and endeavoured to relieve her busy brain by looking at the
window-blind, and noticing the light of the rising moon--now in her last
quarter--creep round upon it: it was the light of an old waning moon
which had but a few days longer to live.

The sight led her to think again of what had happened under the rays of
the same month's moon, a little before its full, the ecstatic
evening scene with Edward: the kiss, and the shortness of those happy
moments--maiden imagination bringing about the apotheosis of a status
quo which had had several unpleasantnesses in its earthly reality.

But sounds were in the ascendant that night. Her ears became aware of a
strange and gloomy murmur.

She recognized it: it was the gushing of the waterfall, faint and low,
brought from its source to the unwonted distance of the House by a faint
breeze which made it distinct and recognizable by reason of the utter
absence of all disturbing sounds. The groom's melancholy representation
lent to the sound a more dismal effect than it would have had of its own
nature. She began to fancy what the waterfall must be like at that hour,
under the trees in the ghostly moonlight. Black at the head, and over
the surface of the deep cold hole into which it fell; white and
frothy at the fall; black and white, like a pall and its border; sad
everywhere.

She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears
to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind. Another
soon came.

The second was quite different from the first--a kind of intermittent
whistle it seemed primarily: no, a creak, a metallic creak, ever and
anon, like a plough, or a rusty wheelbarrow, or at least a wheel of some
kind. Yes, it was, a wheel--the water-wheel in the shru