there and uninterrupted. A good leap, and perhaps one might clear
the narrow terrace and so crash down yet another thirty feet to the
sun-baked ground below. He paused at the corner of the tower, looking
now down into the shadowy gulf below, now up towards the rare stars and
the waning moon. He made a gesture with his hand, muttered something,
he could not afterwards remember what; but the fact that he had said
it aloud gave the utterance a peculiarly terrible significance. Then he
looked down once more into the depths.

"What ARE you doing, Denis?" questioned a voice from somewhere very
close behind him.

Denis uttered a cry of frightened surprise, and very nearly went over
the parapet in good earnest. His heart was beating terribly, and he was
pale when, recovering himself, he turned round in the direction from
which the voice had come.

"Are you ill?"

In the profound shadow that slept under the eastern parapet of the
tower, he saw something he had not previously noticed--an oblong
shape. It was a mattress, and someone was lying on it. Since that first
memorable night on the tower, Mary had slept out every evening; it was a
sort of manifestation of fidelity.

"It gave me a fright," she went on, "to wake up and see you waving your
arms and gibbering there. What on earth were you doing?"

Denis laughed melodramatically. "What, indeed!" he said. If she hadn't
woken up as she did, he would be lying in pieces at the bottom of the
tower; he was certain of that, now.

"You hadn't got designs on me, I hope?" Mary inquired, jumping too
rapidly to conclusions.

"I didn't know you were here," said Denis, laughing more bitterly and
artificially than before.

"What IS the matter, Denis?"

He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and for all reply went on
laughing in the same frightful and improbable tone.

An hour later he was reposing with his head on Mary's knees, and she,
with an affectionate solicitude that was wholly maternal, was running
her fingers through his tangled hair. He had told her everything,
everything: his hopeless love, his jealousy, his despair, his
suicide--as it were providentially averted by her interposition. He had
solemnly promised never to think of self-destruction again. And now his
soul was floating in a sad serenity. It was embalmed in the sympathy
that Mary so generously poured. And it was not only in receiving
sympathy that Denis found serenity and even a kind of happiness; it
was al