r, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of
the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid
revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies.
Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart;
and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran
back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit
before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient,
phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the other
hand there was something fascinating in the very absurdity. He cut along
in his best pedestrian style and I found myself let in for a spell of
severe exercise at eleven o'clock at night.

In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the vast
obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was like a
bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer. Inside, at the
table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs. Fyne sitting with folded arms and not
a hair of her head out of place. She looked exactly like a governess who
had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just the neutral
manner of a governess. To her husband, too, for that matter.

Fyne told her that I was fully informed. Not a muscle of her ruddy
smooth handsome face moved. She had schooled herself into that sort of
thing. Having seen two successive wives of the delicate poet chivied and
worried into their graves, she had adopted that cool, detached manner to
meet her gifted father's outbreaks of selfish temper. It had now become
a second nature. I suppose she was always like that; even in the very
hour of elopement with Fyne. That transaction when one remembered it in
her presence acquired a quaintly marvellous aspect to one's imagination.
But somehow her self-possession matched very well little Fyne's
invariable solemnity.

I was rather sorry for him. Wasn't he worried! The agony of solemnity.
At the same time I was amused. I didn't take a gloomy view of that
"vanishing girl" trick. Somehow I couldn't. But I said nothing. None
of us said anything. We sat about that big round table as if assembled
for a conference and looked at each other in a sort of fatuous
consternation. I would have ended by laughing outright if I had not been
saved from that impropriety by poor Fyne becoming preposterous.

He began wit