s cursed!

Wordsworth.

Calm and still, like the magic mirror of the legend, Shadonake Bath lay
amongst its everlasting shadows.

The great belt of fir-trees beyond it, the sheltering evergreens on
the nearer side, the tiers of grey, moss-grown steps that encompassed
it about, all found their image again upon its smooth and untroubled
surface. There was a golden light from the setting sun to the west,
and the pale mist of a shadowy crescent moon had risen in the east.

It was all quiet here--faint echoes of distant voices and far-away
laughter came up in little gusts from the house; but there was no trace
of the festivities down by the desolate water, nothing but the dark
fir-trees above it, and the great white heads of the water-lilies that
lay like jewels upon its silent bosom.

Vera sat down upon the steps, and rested her chin in her hands, and
waited. The house and the gardens behind her were shut out by the thick
screen of laurels and rhododendrons. Before her, on the other side, were
the fir-trees, with their red, bronzed trunks, and the soft, dark brown
carpet that lay at their feet; there was not even a squirrel stirring
among their branches, nor a bird that fluttered beneath their shadows.

Vera waited. She was not impatient nor anxious. She had nothing to say
to Maurice when he came--she did not mean to keep him, not even for five
minutes, by her side; she did not want to run any further risks with
him--it was better not--better that she should never again be alone with
him. She only meant just to give him that wretched little brown paper
parcel that weighed upon her conscience with the sense of an unfulfilled
vow, and then to go back with him to the house at once. They could have
nothing more to say to each other.

Strangely enough, as she sat there musing all her life came back in
review before her. The old days at Rome, with the favourite sister who
was dead and gone; her own gay, careless life, with its worldly aims and
desires; her first arrival at Sutton, her determination to make herself
Sir John Kynaston's wife, and then her fatal love for his brother; it all
came back to her again. All kinds of little details that she had long
forgotten came flooding in upon her memory. She remembered how she had
first seen Maurice standing at the foot of the staircase, with the light
of the lamp upon his handsome head; and then, again, how one morning she
and he had stood together in this very place by the