nd Denis Wilde crept away from the window on tip-toe with a sense of
shocked horror upon him such as he never remembered having experienced in
his life before.

All at once his pretty, pleasant hostess, with whom he had been glad
enough to banter, and with whom even he had been ready to enter upon a
mild and innocent flirtation, became horrible and hateful to him; and
there came into his mind, like an inspiration, the knowledge of her
enmity to Vera; for it was Vera's note that she had opened and read. Then
his instincts were straightway all awake with the acuteness of a danger,
to something--he knew not what--that threatened the woman he loved.

"Thank God, I am here," he said to himself. "That woman is her foe, and
she will be dangerous to her. I would not have come to her house had I
known it; but now I am here, I will stay, for it is certain that she will
need a friend."

At dinner-time the note lay by Maurice's side on the table. Whilst the
soup was being helped he took it up and opened it. He little knew how
narrowly both his wife and his guest watched him as he read it.

But his face was inscrutable. Only he talked a little more, and seemed,
perhaps, in better spirits than usual; but that is what a stranger could
not have noticed, although it is possible that Helen may have done so.

"By the vicarage gate," she had said, and it was there that he found her.
Behind her lay the dark and silent garden, beyond it the house, with its
wide-open drawing-room windows, and the stream of yellow light from the
lamp within, lying in a golden streak across the lawn. She leant over the
gate; an archway of greenery, dark in the night's dim light, was above
her head, and clusters of pale, creamy roses hung down about her on every
side.

It was that sort of owl's light that has no distinctness in it, and yet
is far removed from darkness. Vera's perfect figure, clad in some white,
clinging garment that fell about her in thick, heavy folds, stood out
with a statue-like clearness against the dark shrubs behind her. She
seemed like some shadowy queen of the night. Out of the dimness, the
clear oval of her perfect face shone pale as the waning moon far away
behind the church tower, whilst the dusky veil of her dark hair lost
itself vaguely in the shadows, and melted away into the background.
A poet might have hymned her thus, but no painter could have painted her.

And it was thus that he found her. For the first time for many we