any
equally diverting sequel.

The daylight was coming, and I believed, a trifle regretfully, that that
great solvent of all mysteries would display these emotions of the night
as the phantasmagoria of our imagination.

Before I had reached the end of the tunnel through the wood and had come
out into the open whence I could, now, see the loom of Jervaise Clump
swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided
that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had
fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the
motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not
be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had
accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I
had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if
they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other
indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight
drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had
said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.

As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was
constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the
Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the
statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly
headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me,
whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.

It isn't one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.

V

DAYBREAK

He was whistling Schubert's setting of "Who is Sylvia?" and as I climbed
slowly and as silently as I could towards him, I fitted the music to the
words of the second verse:--

Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.

Only a man in love, I thought, could be whistling that air with such
attention and accuracy. He hit that unusual interval--is it an augmented
seventh?--with a delicacy that was quite thrilling.

He had the world to himself, as yet. The birds of the morning had not
begun their orisons, while the birds of the night, the owls and the
corncrakes had, happily, retired before the promise of that weakening
darkness which seemed nevertheless to have reached a moment of
suspense--indeed, I fancied that it was darker, now, than when I had come
out of the Hall a quarter of an hour before.