erhead.

Chris was soon ready, and stood there a moment, a pale figure in the
gloom, watching the shining dots rock back again in the ripples to
motionlessness. Then he lifted his hands and plunged.

It seemed to him, as he rose to the surface again, as if he were
swimming between two sides. As he moved softly out across the middle,
and a little ripple moved before him, the water was invisible. There was
only a fathomless gulf, as deep below as the sky was high above, pricked
with stars. As he turned his head this way and that the great trees,
high overhead, seemed less real than those two immeasurable spaces above
and beneath. There was a dead silence everywhere, only broken by the
faint suck of the water over his shoulder, and an indescribably sweet
coolness that thrilled him like a strain of music. Under its influence,
again, as last night, the tangible, irritating world seemed to sink out
of his soul; here he was, a living creature alone in a great silence
with God, and nothing else was of any importance.

He turned on his back, and there was the dark figure on the bank
watching him, and above it the great towered house, with its half-dozen
lighted windows along its eastern side, telling him of the world of men
and passion.

"Look," came the priest's voice, and he turned again, and over the
further bank, between two tall trees, shone a great silver rim of the
rising moon. A path of glory was struck now across the black water, and
he pleased himself by travelling up it towards the remote splendour,
noticing as he went how shadows had sprung into being in that moment,
and how the same light that made the glory made the dark as well. His
soul seemed to emerge a stage higher yet from the limits in which the
hot day and the shouting and the horns and the crowded woods had
fettered it. How remote and little seemed Ralph's sneers and Nicholas's
indiscretions and Mary's pity! Here he moved round in a cooler and
serener mood. That keen mood, whether physical or spiritual he did not
care to ask, made him inarticulate as he walked up with the priest ten
minutes later. But Mr. Carleton seemed to understand.

"There are some things besides the divorce best not talked about," he
said, "and I think bathing by starlight is one of them."

They passed under the chapel window presently, and Chris noticed with an
odd sensation of pleasure the little translucent patch of colour between
the slender mullions thrown by the lamp withi