s, and night spread over the sea.

The evening was chilly, and there was no moon. Knight sat close to
Elfride, and, when the darkness rendered the position of a person a
matter of uncertainty, particularly close. Elfride edged away.

'I hope you allow me my place ungrudgingly?' he whispered.

'Oh yes; 'tis the least I can do in common civility,' she said,
accenting the words so that he might recognize them as his own returned.

Both of them felt delicately balanced between two possibilities. Thus
they reached home.

To Knight this mild experience was delightful. It was to him a gentle
innocent time--a time which, though there may not be much in it, seldom
repeats itself in a man's life, and has a peculiar dearness when glanced
at retrospectively. He is not inconveniently deep in love, and is lulled
by a peaceful sense of being able to enjoy the most trivial thing with
a childlike enjoyment. The movement of a wave, the colour of a stone,
anything, was enough for Knight's drowsy thoughts of that day to
precipitate themselves upon. Even the sermonizing platitudes the
vicar had delivered himself of--chiefly because something seemed to
be professionally required of him in the presence of a man of Knight's
proclivities--were swallowed whole. The presence of Elfride led him not
merely to tolerate that kind of talk from the necessities of ordinary
courtesy; but he listened to it--took in the ideas with an enjoyable
make-believe that they were proper and necessary, and indulged in a
conservative feeling that the face of things was complete.

Entering her room that evening Elfride found a packet for herself on
the dressing-table. How it came there she did not know. She tremblingly
undid the folds of white paper that covered it. Yes; it was the treasure
of a morocco case, containing those treasures of ornament she had
refused in the daytime.

Elfride dressed herself in them for a moment, looked at herself in the
glass, blushed red, and put them away. They filled her dreams all that
night. Never had she seen anything so lovely, and never was it more
clear that as an honest woman she was in duty bound to refuse them.
Why it was not equally clear to her that duty required more vigorous
co-ordinate conduct as well, let those who dissect her say.

The next morning glared in like a spectre upon her. It was Stephen's
letter-day, and she was bound to meet the postman--to stealthily do a
deed she had never liked, to secure an end s