t, that bewildered her. Yesterday, she told
herself, it was a deep, but well-controlled and respectable little
stream. To-day it was a flood. "I must keep my feet," she thought; "I
must not be swept away!" The thought of him was sometimes
overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative,
and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the
thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the
northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during
darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun went
higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the cries of the
water-birds, the buzz of insects over the bright lake, became more
insistent, and the blue and lovely morning spread and strengthened
round her, criticism and analysis failed. She could only think of him,
helplessly, saying to herself what she had once heard a peasant woman
say: "My heart'd open when I thinks of him."

Across the park came repeated notes from the horn, the baying of
hounds, and the screams that celebrate with orthodox excitement the
death of a fox. The rat-hunt was over. Joker lifted his spare,
aristocratic head from the grass, and listened, with a wisp of dewy
green stuff in his mouth. Christian looked at her watch. It was early
still, not eight o'clock. A grey horse and its rider came forth from
the dark grove of laurels. Larry was looking for her. She sighed; she
did not know why. She thought of the old Mendelssohn open-air
part-song:

"The talk of the lovers in silence dies,
They weep, yet they know not why tears fill their eyes."

The old, absurd words, that she had so often laughed at. She laughed
again, but at herself, and sat still, watching the grey mare coming
lightly over the sunny grass to her.

"They got him!" Larry shouted, as he came near. "The brute wouldn't
run for 'em! Too full of hen, I suppose! They're going on now to the
gorse in the high paddock. Why did you come away here?"

"Because I'm illogical. I like hunting, and I hate catching what I
hunt. Besides, I wanted to think."

"Rotten habit," said Larry. "I won't have you changing your mind!"

Christian looked at him, and sighed again. He was on her right, and
she took her hunting-crop in her left hand, with the reins, and
stretched out her right hand to him. He caught it, and kissed her
slender wrist above the glove. There came back to Christian, with a
rush, the remembrance of the May morni