he laughed. "My sweet, your
face from where I'm sitting is as filmy as a rose at dusk. And even if
you can see the Abbey, what does it matter? Do you think it's going to
run down the hill and swim after us?"

Pauline tried to laugh, but even that grotesque picture of his evoked a
new terror, and, huddled among the cushions, she sat with beating
heart, shuddering when the leaves of the great beech-trees fondled her
hair. She looked back to her own white fastness and began to wonder if
she had left the candle burning there; it seemed to her that she had,
and that perhaps presently, perhaps even now, somebody was coming to see
why it was burning. And still Guy took her farther up the stream. How
empty her room would look, and what a chill would fall upon the sister
or mother that peeped in.

"Oh, take me back!" she cried.

But still the canoe cleft the darkness and now, emerging from the
cavernous trees, they glided once again into starshine infinitely
outspread, through which with the dim glister of a snake the stream
coiled and uncoiled itself.

Guy grasped at the reeds and drew the canoe close against the bank,
making it fast with two paddles plunged into the mud. Then he gathered
her to him so that her head rested upon his shoulder and her lips could
meet his. Thus enfolded for a long while she lay content. The candle in
her room burned itself out and nothing could disturb her absence, no one
could suppose that she was here on this starlit river. Scarcely, indeed,
was she here except as in the midway of deepest sleep, resting between a
dream and a dream. She might have stayed unvexed for ever if Guy had not
begun to talk, for although at first his voice came softly and
pleasantly out of the night and lulled her like a tune heard faintly in
some far-off corner of the mind, minute by minute his accents became
more real; suddenly, as her drowsed arm slid over the edge of the canoe
into the water, she woke and began herself to talk and, as she talked,
to shrink again from the vision of her whole life whether past or
present or to come.

In this malicious darkness she wanted to hear more about that girl who
had betrayed Michael Fane; she wanted to know things that before she had
not even known were hidden. She pressed Guy with questions, and when he
would not answer them she began to feel jealous even of unrevealed sin.
This girl was the link between all those girls at whose existence in his
own past Guy had once hin