"Kit, it is I. Listen to me," says some one, and then a hole in the
hedge is cleared, and Mr. Desmond, stepping through it, enters the
moonlit patch, flushed but shamelessly unembarrassed.

Kit, pale with disappointment, regards him silently with no gentle
glance.

"And to think," she says, at length, with slow scorn, looking him up and
down with measureless contempt,--"to think I was mad enough to believe
for one long moment that you might be Apollo, and that your voice was a
cry from Parnassus!"

At which, I regret to say, Mr. Desmond gives way to most unseemly
mirth. "I never dreamed I should attain to such glory," he says. "I feel
like 'the rapt one of the godlike forehead.'"

"You _may_," says the younger Miss Beresford, who has awakened from the
dim dusk of "faerie lands forlorn" to the clearer light of earth. "You
may," witheringly, "_feel_ like it, but you certainly don't _look_ like
it."

"I am not complete, I know that," says Mr. Desmond still full of unholy
enjoyment. "I lack 'bright Apollo's lute strung with his hair;' but if
you will wait a moment I will run back to Coole and get the nearest
thing to it."

He turns as if to fulfil his words, but Kit stops him.

"Don't go," she says, laughing gayly, now herself. "Even the very
original lute would not transform you into a god. Stay if you want to.
After all, now I am again in my senses, I daresay you are as good to
talk to as a heathen deity."

"Oh, no," says Mr. Desmond, humbly. "They always thundered when they
spoke: so think how imposing and convincing their arguments must have
been!"

"Horrid, _I_ should think," says Kit. "And now tell me what brought you
here?"

This is abrupt, but, taking her in her own mood, Desmond answers,
bluntly,--

"Monica."

"She _told_ you to come?"

"No. But I want to see her."

"She has gone to her room."

"Make her leave it again. Tell her I cannot rest until I see her; tell
her anything; only bring her to me for even one short moment."

"But it is some time since I left her: perhaps she is in bed."

"But not asleep yet, surely. She loves _you_, Kit: induce her, then, to
come to her window, that I may even catch a glimpse of her, if I may not
speak with her. But she cannot be in bed; it is so early," says Mr.
Desmond, desperately.

"Well," says Kit, relenting, and striving to forget the blank occasioned
by the substitution of an ordinary Desmond for an extraordinary deity,
"I'll see what can be done