that should have been new to him, but that
it was, above all, her voice.

"I was on my way to you."

"I know. I thought you might perhaps come. If you had not--I think I was
on my way to you."

It seemed not unnatural.

"Did you find--any message from me when you came?" she asked presently,
in a quieted, almost a contented tone.

It shot--the message--before his eyes, though he had seen it no message,
in the preoccupation of his arrival.

"I found a rose on my dressing-table," he told her; and the rose stood
for him in a wonder of tenderness, looking back.

"I smuggled it in," she confessed, "I knew your old servant--she used
to be with us. The others--from Dr Drummond's--have been there all day
making it warm and comfortable for you. I had no right to do anything
like that, but I had the right, hadn't I, to bring the rose?"

"I don't know," he answered her, hard-pressed, "how we are to bear
this."

She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of a surgeon's
knife.

"We are not to bear it," she said eagerly. "The rose is to tell you
that. I didn't mean it, when I left it, to be anything more--more than a
rose; but now I do. I didn't even know when I came out tonight. But
now I do. We aren't to bear it, Hugh. I don't want it so--now. I
can't--can't have it so."

She came nearer to him again and caught with her two hands the lapels
of his coat. He closed his own over them and looked down at her in that
half-detachment, which still claimed and held her.

"Advena," he whispered, out of the sudden clamour in his mind, "she
can't be--she isn't--nothing has happened to her?"

She smiled faintly, but her eyes were again full of fear at his
implication of the only way.

"Oh, no!" she said. "But you have been away, and she has come. I have
seen her; and oh! she won't care, Hugh--she won't care."

Her asking, straining face seemed to gather and reflect all the light
there was in the shifting night about them. The rain had stopped, but
the wind still hurtled past, whirling the leaves from one darkness to
another. They were as isolated, as outlawed there in the wild wet wind
as they were in the confusion of their own souls.

"We must care," he said helplessly, clinging to the sound and form of
the words.

"Oh, no!" she cried. "No, no! Indeed I know now what is possible and
what is not!"

For an instant her eyes searched the rigid lines of his face in
astonishment. In their struggle to establish the