She passed round the
shrubbery, unlatched the garden door, and skimmed with her keen eyes the
whole twilighted space that the four walls enclosed and sheltered: they
were not there. She mounted a little ladder, which had been used for
gathering fruit, and looked over the wall into the field. This field
extended to the limits of the glebe, which was enclosed on that side by
a privet-hedge. Under the hedge was Mr. Swancourt, walking up and down,
and talking aloud--to himself, as it sounded at first. No: another voice
shouted occasional replies; and this interlocutor seemed to be on the
other side of the hedge. The voice, though soft in quality, was not
Stephen's.

The second speaker must have been in the long-neglected garden of an old
manor-house hard by, which, together with a small estate attached, had
lately been purchased by a person named Troyton, whom Elfride had never
seen. Her father might have struck up an acquaintanceship with some
member of that family through the privet-hedge, or a stranger to the
neighbourhood might have wandered thither.

Well, there was no necessity for disturbing him.

And it seemed that, after all, Stephen had not yet made his desired
communication to her father. Again she went indoors, wondering where
Stephen could be. For want of something better to do, she went upstairs
to her own little room. Here she sat down at the open window, and,
leaning with her elbow on the table and her cheek upon her hand, she
fell into meditation.

It was a hot and still August night. Every disturbance of the silence
which rose to the dignity of a noise could be heard for miles, and the
merest sound for a long distance. So she remained, thinking of Stephen,
and wishing he had not deprived her of his company to no purpose, as it
appeared. How delicate and sensitive he was, she reflected; and yet he
was man enough to have a private mystery, which considerably elevated
him in her eyes. Thus, looking at things with an inward vision, she lost
consciousness of the flight of time.

Strange conjunctions of circumstances, particularly those of a trivial
everyday kind, are so frequent in an ordinary life, that we grow used to
their unaccountableness, and forget the question whether the very long
odds against such juxtaposition is not almost a disproof of it being a
matter of chance at all. What occurred to Elfride at this moment was a
case in point. She was vividly imagining, for the twentieth time, the
kiss o