She lay in a quiet corner of the Rectory Garden, looking up at the majestic white clouds, that sailed across the blue of the summer sky, like Viking ships under full sail, speeding along over the deep blue of a limitless ocean. How glorious they were! How wonderful to contemplate these summer nimbi, in their immaculate, fleecy whiteness, in their shadowy recesses, in their glistening summits. They were pure and radiant, even as the girl's soul was, and by their affinity with it they seemed to call it up to them, to lift it up away from the sordid Rectory, with its harsh, unloving father, its dejected, stupid mother, its quarrelling daughters; away from the horrible village, full of vice, squalor and disease; away from the narrow stone church, in which a yet narrower creed was weekly preached. Away from all these, to the contemplation of the pure and the beautiful, these glorious clouds called her, and she loved them, the friends and companions of her thoughts through many a lonely hour. Now, in the hush of a hot afternoon, she lay very still under the gold rain of the laburnum-trees, looking up at the towering snowy masses in a rapture of delight.

Stossop Rectory lay, in its old-fashioned country grounds, inland from the sea about two miles on the south coast of Devon, and a very beautiful old place it was, long and low, containing many rooms, and having a deep gabled roof of Titian-red, that showed above the wealth of white and delicately pink roses that veiled its face; and if the Rectory from without looked the typical, peaceful English home, so within was it the really typical English home, full of disunion, pettiness, quarrelling, hatred and discontent. The English are perhaps of all humanity the greatest humbugs; they love, more than anything in the world, pretence; and the farther away the reality is from the sham they create out of their imagination the more dearly they love the sham; hence those amazing pictures of the domestic hearth, the happy, rosy-cheeked children, the smiling mother, the loving, protective father; the gentle temper, the sunny cheerfulness, the air of rest and peace and safety pervading all. Has anyone ever been the inmate of, or the visitor to, such a home? Let all who read these lines recall their recollections of home, their own and those they have seen. Whoever it was who wrote "Home, Sweet Home," one feels the author must have been an orphan and brought up at a school. The home in reality is the place where everyone feels they can display their bad temper and their bad manners, as they can wear their oldest, ugliest clothes and their surliest expressions. The heroic manly brothers of the story-book spend their time in pulling their sisters' hair and kicking them under the table; the gentle sisters hate them secretly in return; the father grumbles at his wife, the wife scolds the servants; and so the dreary round of home life goes on. The boys escape from it as soon as they can; the girls rebelliously long to follow; the unhappy wife and mother hopes vaguely for some relief that never comes; the father cherishes in his heart the memory of his last visit to town, on business, and looks forward eagerly to the next, enlivening the dull and stupid time that intervenes by bullying his wife.

Such is the average home, and such was it at Stossop Rectory, and, but for the enchanted garden, Regina Marlow, the Rector's youngest daughter, who was of totally different stamp and mould from the rest of the family, could never have supported life in it at all.

Some really golden moments in Mrs. Marlow's life, in which the Rector had no part—being away on one of his business visits to town—accounted for Regina. She was the child of love and passion, as the others were of distaste and dislike, for Mrs. Marlow entertained for her husband that solid dislike which is the basis of most marital relations. And the elder daughters, conceived and nurtured in it, had hate engrained in every fibre of their bodies. It showed in the spiteful gleams of their eyes, in the downward turn of their mouths, in their incessant wrangling with each other. Beautiful they were, for Mrs. Marlow was beautiful, but the nine months of inward revolt from her husband that she had suffered in each case while they were being fashioned within her, of her blood and her bone and her brain, had given them both the terrible curse of the hating soul. But Regina, born of love, of that sweet tenderness like the spring zephyr, of that wild passion like a summer storm, that the gods have given to man to illumine the darkness of the earth, Regina showed love and joy in every line of her face and form. Her mouth was always smiling; its curves were upwards, not downwards. Her voice was soft with all the notes of love and sex in it; her eyelids were sweetly arched; her blue eyes overflowed with tenderness and smiles; her soul was filled to the brim with what the Rector would have termed the "grace of God," and not untruly, since God is love. All through Regina's creation her mother had dwelt on love and on its sacred memories, and naturally enough the embryo conceived and reared in love and loving thoughts came into the world fitted out and equipped for love. Ah, how little do women think of the evil they commit when they give themselves to husbands they do not love! The hideous crime it is, blacker than any, to give life to beings burdened with evil souls, do they ever think of it? That hate they feel for the father, do they not realise how it bears fruit in the evil tempers and passions of the child? Mrs. Marlow, deep in her inmost heart, always thought of Regina, the gay, loving, radiant Regina, as the child of sin. No small voice ever whispered to her that the elder children, fretful, vicious, unhealthy, malicious, reflections of her own state of mind when bearing them, were children of a greater sin—against themselves, against society, against the human race.

She never thought about these things; she believed herself to be a thoroughly good woman, who had sinned once in her life, but sincerely repented.

She had dismissed her lover; she had turned a deaf ear to the passionate entreaties of the man who really wanted her, and had remained to do her duty to her husband, who would have been so thankful to be free from her—duty, which consisted, according to her ideas, in counting his shirts when they came home from the wash, presiding over the flannel club he had started in the village, seeing that he had three meals a day and that the Rectory was cleaned up twice a year, and disliking him extremely the whole time.

Year by year her face hardened and her intellect diminished under the cramping influence of the hating habit; now and then the lines of her mouth would soften and her eyes glow tenderly as she thought of Regina's father, but she immediately chased the warmth of love out of her heart as most improper, and hastened off to fold her husband's clothes or put his books in order, with the proper feeling of repulsion, hatred and disgust to which she was accustomed.

Whether such a state of living and being would really be acceptable to the one who said, Love one another, and Blessed are the pure in heart, she never stopped to ask herself. That she would have been accounted by him the "whitened sepulchre" never occurred to her.

Regina's presence she could not bear, the girl reminded her too vividly of what she was always trying vainly to forget; and so, while her mother busied herself more and more with old women's charities and parochial meetings, Regina was left more and more to her own studies, and for her pleasures to the enchanted garden. The enchanted garden belonged to an unoccupied villa by the sea called "The Chalet." The owner had left it in charge of a caretaker and a gardener, but had begged the Rector to visit both house and garden occasionally and see that things were kept in good order. The Rector being very busy had gradually allowed this duty to devolve on Regina, who possessed herself of the keys, made friends with the gardener, and undertook to report on the property from time to time to the owner. In this way a great joy had come into her life. She fell in love with the garden at first sight of it, and her visits there soon became a passion of delight to her. In both winter and summer the garden was almost equally beautiful. From its extraordinarily sheltered position no winds could get into it to riot there. Rain and snow to fall upon its velvet ground had to filter through a maze of foliage which neither withered nor fell through all the dizzy circle of the seasons. The garden was sunk slightly below the level of the green, grassy, sheltered and little-frequented road that lay on one side of it, and from which it was screened by masses of tamarisks grown into splendid trees and banks of wild red roses, the tree stems of which were as thick as a man's arm; on the other side of the garden, enclosing all the magic space, was a low stone balustrade, and through its interstices glittered the dancing blue of the sea; over the balustrade, and far above it, towered great aloes, with their spiky leaves, and auricarias, and more red climbing roses, and ever here and there their gentle sprays parted and let through them a vision of the wide sea and the blue and violet lines of distant hills on a far-off coast. In the centre of the garden rose in its stately majesty a single palm, and stretched its benign and glorious branches widely and evenly on every side, catching the rosy light of the dawn, the red glow of the afternoon and the crimson of the sunset through the procession of the hours; for the garden lay to the south, and the sun made it his resting-place through all the golden day; beneath the palm, cool in its shade, lay green turf, emerald-coloured, velvety, wonderful; and on this without order, except the gracious order of nature, stood at wide intervals standard rose-trees bearing blossoms of every shape and hue—white and amber and cream, red, crimson to blackness, blush-pink like a maiden's cheek, yellow and deep orange—and all of them were scented. Unlike the over-cultivated roses of some rich man's garden, where excessive culture has induced extravagant size at the expense of the flower's natural mystic charm, its perfume, these flowers were all comparatively small, but rich both in colour and fragrance. So sweet was the breath of the roses that for half-a-mile before one reached the garden its divine scent drifted out to the wayfarer and, as in Damascus, the whole air and every breeze whispered of the rose.

To Regina these rose-trees standing on the green grass, not in lines, or rows or circles, not in beds nor borders, seemed less like plants than living figures; they seemed to her fancy to stand like beautiful girls in a ballroom waiting for their partners to dance with, and the perfume diffused by them in the air seemed like the music of their innocent conversation. She never tired of watching them and noting the graceful attitudes in which they stood, and how sometimes two or three would bend together as if to murmur their confidences.

Round the great oval of the green turf, with its standing roses, ran a narrow path, and this towards the western end of the garden met other little paths, and these all ran, together or separately, now side by side, now widely diverse through thickets of tamarisk, aloe and rose, under other thick branching palms, where it was so dark at noon under tangled creeper and vine that it seemed like evening; and yet, dark though they were, all these winding, hidden paths led at last out to the porphyry balustrade and the glittering purple sea.

The effect of this garden on Regina's artistic, poetic, beauty-loving nature was like magic. However sad or irritated, nervous, ill or angry she might be when she came there, once the gate of the garden was passed a deep peace fell upon her. All here was silence, rest and fragrance; the perfect harmony of light and shade, the mystic presence of beauty; and all her cares and troubles, and the annoyances of the petty world in which she lived, fell from her; her soul seemed to unfurl its wings and soar through radiant spaces, and everything was forgotten but the beauty of the earth and the glory of light and colour and the laugh of the joyous sea.

To the girl lying gazing up at the white clouds this Sunday afternoon the thought of the garden came sweetly, and she got up and shook out the folds of her cambric gown and took the winding path through the Rectory garden which led to the old road to the coast. She had no hat, and through the lace of her white parasol the sun streamed down warmly on her thick and waving hair, hair itself sun-coloured and light-filled, and on the pale rose of her cheeks and the blue of her eyes softly shaded by their curling lashes. Tall, erect and graceful, in the first glory of her youth, Regina Marlow walked that afternoon with the step and carriage that her name implied. As she walked, she was thinking; she had a small black scholarly-looking book clasped in her hand, but to-day she was not thinking of her studies: her thoughts clustered round an approaching event which was coming to disturb the even discomfort of the Rectory, and which had been the sole topic of conversation at luncheon that day. A friend of the Rector, a junior chum of his in Oxford days, had been invited and was coming to stay at Stossop with them, and Regina wondered very much within herself whether he would be interesting or not. She had heard that he was immensely rich, but that did not interest her at all, though the whole family had nearly fallen into a violent quarrel amongst themselves as to the exact amount of his income and the number of his country houses, much to Regina's amusement, who could not see what it mattered to them whether he were once or three times a millionaire. She had heard that he had travelled a great deal, which attracted her, but chiefly, she understood, for sport, which repelled her. That he was a very brilliant individual, much sought after, courted and fÊted in society, impressed her, but only vaguely, since the world of men and their judgments and opinions were very far away from Stossop.

Her query to the Rector as to his appearance had been answered by: "Oh yes; Everest was the best-looking fellow at Oxford," a phrase that left her equally uninformed, since she had no idea what the men at Oxford were like. If they resembled the average individual she saw at Stossop, the Rector's words would not necessarily mean much. And out of this chaotic non-knowledge of him in her mind, and from the incessant chatter of her sisters about him, a very splendid and glowing vision of the stranger had gradually grown up, and she looked forward to this evening, when he was going to arrive, with a joyous sense of elation and interest which was impersonal in its nature and very different from the anxious, calculating hopes that inspired the rest of the family.

To Regina's intense and secret amusement she saw that her sisters had quite made up their minds that Everest Lanark, his unusual rent-roll and indeterminable number of country houses, should be captured by one or other of them; and the Rector, while professing to be entirely disinterested, really fell in with this idea, while her mother openly exerted herself about the girls' wardrobes, and fussed over their new evening dresses, warning them against burning their complexions, and urging them to practise their drawing-room songs before his arrival. To Regina's keen intelligence the idea that a man of large resources, of wide travel, of immense experience, who had reached the age of forty-six or seven, untouched by all the beauty that, according to all accounts, had always been at his feet, should immediately succumb to the attractions of an ordinary, country girl, without rank, title, wealth or any of those things to which he was accustomed—without talent or charm of any sort except youth and a pretty face—seemed improbable in the extreme.

For her sisters Regina felt that sort of marvelling wonder that the naturally clever and gifted individual feels for the ordinary person, and which is far greater than any admiring wonder that the limited brain of the ordinary person can conceive for the clever one.

Why did they not do something—and something well—she often asked herself. They did nothing, and wanted to do nothing; they knew nothing, and wanted to know nothing.

To Regina, always learning, always acquiring, always thinking, always doing something, it seemed truly marvellous.

In the Rectory there was a splendid library, full of books in all kinds of languages, treating of all countries, religions and philosophies; yet neither of the elder girls had opened one of them. They hardly realised that any other religion than the Christian existed, barely knew whether the world was round or square, knew no language but their own, had no conception of what was conveyed by the words Roman Empire, and had never heard of Troy. They played a very little on the piano and sung a little less, badly and out of time. They went to church regularly and visited the poor, because their parents insisted on their doing it, in their quality of the Rector's daughters, and Regina often wondered what the "poor" thought of them. The rest of the time they spent reading some novel that dealt exclusively with English life, for they could not understand any other; fashioning and refashioning their costumes, and hoping vaguely for the wealthy individuals they thought they deserved to come to the Rectory and insist on marrying them!

To Regina, who was up with the light of the dawn to read and study and work, who had absorbed already the learning of a quarter of the library, who had mastered Greek and Latin and read in five modern languages besides, though she had no opportunity of speaking them, who played really well and was endued with a natural gift for painting, the ignorance and apathy of her sisters were beyond understanding.

She did not know that her own splendid health and energy, her capacity for hard work and concentration, her quick and eager mind, all came from that golden source: the passionate love that had formed her being. Had she known the heavy handicap laid upon her sisters at their birth she would have pitied them even more than she did now, and wondered at them less.

By the time she reached the garden the sun was low in the sky and great bars of yellow light fell all across the vivid green amongst the standing roses. She opened and closed the gate very softly, for the birds were singing, and the white doves that belonged to the Chalet were cooing, and she did not want to jar upon the concert. She entered silently, and slowly walked round the winding paths, her whole being lifted up and expanding in the peace and fragrance and beauty of this radiant solitude.

How many afternoons and evenings had she not walked there alone! And now, to-morrow perhaps, she would bring the stranger there to see it. Would he feel the enchantment of it as she did, she wondered, or would he say, as her father had done: "Those roses, you know, Regina, ought to be in beds; it's absurd having them all over the place like this."

That should be the test, she thought: if he said anything like that, or if he suggested that the wild tamarisks should be cut down or thinned out, she would not care about him.

It was a curious fact that, in all her reverie concerning him, it never once occurred to her to picture what his feelings might be for her: she was wholly absorbed in wondering what her feelings might be towards him. So far in her experience with men, and it had not been very wide or deep, she had found them uniformly fall in love with her, and she had grown to accept this, without paying much attention to it, as a common habit of theirs, like smoking.

The doctor had wanted her to marry him and preside over the village dispensary; the curate had wanted her to marry him and manage coal clubs and write his sermons for him all the rest of her life; the Latin master had wanted her to marry him and take his boys' class in Greek verse, and the same master's assistant had wanted her to marry him and run away to London with him; but to all of these Regina had said a very gentle No, though her heart had beat at their words and her colour had come and gone uncertainly, for she unconsciously responded to all love as the bell responds to the vibration of the note to which it is attuned.

Regina, naturally, never spoke to anyone of these offers and refusals, but they gradually became known in the village, as everything is always known in an English village. When the grumpy doctor became more surly and grumpy than ever; when the Latin master took to caning his boys every day instead of every week; when the curate came to church whiter than his surplice, with dark rings under his eyes, and the assistant master went away to town and shot himself in his lodgings there, it was all put down to Regina, and her conduct in having had four proposals was called "disgraceful" by the ladies in the village who had not had one, and were twice and three times her age.

The curate asked her if it was not very miserable for a woman to feel she was making a man unhappy, and Regina had answered very truly: "Yes; but she gets accustomed to it." She could not marry them all, and had she married one the other three would still have been unconsoled. So, when she was being abused and reproached for her heartlessness, she simply went away to the enchanted garden and tried to forget about all of them. Her sisters' strange conceit in themselves prevented them from owing her any ill-will for these events.

They fancied that Regina's lovers did not aspire to them; that, while good enough for her, they would not dare to lift their eyes to the beautiful elder daughters of the Rector, the real fact being that none of the four men would have burdened his life with either of the silly, weakly, useless creatures.

Regina, lying with her cheek pressed to the bright green turf, listened in silence to the wild beating of her heart, as she thought of love. "Surely it must mean more than they think and make of it," she told herself when the memory of these men recurred to her. And she leaned most towards the young master, because he had given up his life for love, but, greatly though his enthusiastic mind had pleased her, his face and figure had not, and she did not regret him.

She would look up to the roses leaning over her and repeat to them some Greek lines that fascinated her: "Oh, children, what is this that men call love?" And the roses seemed to quiver and bend lower over her to hear the answer: "Love is not love alone, but indeed is known by many names; it is unbridled violence; it is unslaked thirst; it is intolerable anguish; it is unbounded joy; it is endless lamentation," and as a breath stirred in the garden the trees seemed to throw high their blossoms on the scented breeze in a wild and gay response: "Whatever it is, good or ill, we wait for it, worship it, live for it, die for it." This seemed their song to the girl, and the white doves took it up and echoed it, and the thrushes warbled it in their passionate throats, and the nightingales in the dark parts of the garden trilled out in warm melody the same notes: "Wait for it, worship it, live for it, die for it," and the girl heard it, with a wonderful elation and triumph filling her, for she knew that whatever gift the gods might have denied her in this life they had bestowed the supreme one of all—the power to love, and to inspire love. It was this intuitive knowledge of the great power within her, the limitless capacity for devotion, the aptitude for love, that, paradoxical as it may seem, had kept her from love so far.

She knew that somewhere in the world there must be men who possessed beauty and strength and grace and intellect, all that she loved; and one of these would call up in her that same wild elation, that keen rush of adoration, the vivid joy, that she felt under the sky at sunset, when it arrayed itself in its most glorious colours, or in the garden, when the roses poured over her their fragrance, or in Exeter Cathedral, when the roll of melody from the organ seemed to catch up her breathless soul and carry it away to unknown spheres. She felt in fact that need of her being to worship which, in the young and innocent, is the first knowledge of love. And as her reason revolted from worshipping the doctor or the curate or the Latin master or the assistant master, she knew that she did not love, and she would not marry them. For before a clever and well-awakened mind can give itself over to the worship of any object, either that object must be worthy of the worship, or it must so dazzle the senses of the worshipper, throw such a magic glamour around itself, that it appears to be worthy of it; Regina had never seen anyone yet who could capture her reason or dazzle her senses, and now the query came before her, floating hazily, cloud-like on the horizon of her thoughts, would this new-comer to the Rectory bring with him the power of the sunset skies and the cathedral music?

For a whole fortnight nothing had been talked of except the approaching visit. It had engrossed the entire household. The finest bedroom in the Rectory, with a little sitting-room opening out of it, had been assigned to the guest, and to these rooms the occupants of the house had carried their various treasures, sometimes openly, sometimes surreptitiously. Mrs. Marlow had contributed her favourite lounging-chair from her boudoir, Miss Marlow had lent her silver clock, and Miss Violet Marlow her set of silken cushions from her own sofa, and many more pretty and graceful objects had travelled that way for many days, till the family really felt that their guest would be pleased with the little suite, even accustomed as he was, in their imagination, to be surrounded by tokens of fabulous wealth. Regina that morning had herself placed on the dressing-table as her contribution two lovely roses of perfect shape and hue, in a slender vase of gilded crystal, but Miss Marlow having come in and noticed the divine fragrance filling all the air, and recognising her sister's vase, had seized the golden roses by their heads, torn them out of the water and flung them into the garden, just as Regina was passing underneath. She looked up with a glance of amused irony rather than anger. Such little amenities were not uncommon in the Rectory home.

"You have no business to interfere with his rooms," Miss Marlow called from the window. "We don't want flowers in here, dropping their leaves and making the place untidy."

Regina raised her shoulders a little and passed on in silence, having stooped and gathered up the glorious blossoms, so fresh that they were little hurt by the fall, and they were now blooming in her room. A smile was on her face as she pursued her way. She would wear them that night at dinner and he should admire them on her instead of on his table, that was all.

She walked now from end to end of the garden, thinking of the morrow or the next day, when she would bring him there. All was in perfect order; she had never seen it look more lovely, and she leant at last with a sigh of contentment on the balustrade, gazing across the purple expanse of the sea, to the hazy golden outlines of the distant coast.

How the thrushes sang, till the whole air quivered about her with melody. And but for love they would never sing at all, and but for love the roses would have no scent, the doves would not coo, the trees would have no blossom and no fruit. What a wonderful gift it is to the world, she thought, this love!—the author of everything pleasing and beautiful, the source of eternal life. No wonder that through all the ages men have worshipped it and sung of it, and poured out all the powers of their brain to magnify it. And yet the never-ending pÆan chanted throughout the centuries is but a feeble and inadequate whisper of its greatness. Man's voice being human is not attuned to sing fittingly of what is divine. Men realise that life comes from love, but how many realise that also all the decoration of life comes from it! Even if we could exist without love, with it we must give up the beauty of women, the fragrance of flowers, the melody of birds, the charm of the human voice, the power of the brain.

These are not separate entities, they are simply the effects of the power of love.

A silver clash of bells, softened by distance, came from the church tower across the bay, and slowly, regretfully, Regina took her arm from the balustrade. She could not stay longer in the garden now, but to-morrow!

Through the wonderful golden light of a June afternoon she took her way slowly homeward, across the hay meadows and fields of standing corn, by many little cross cuts that she knew, and arrived at the Rectory about an hour before the time for their guest to arrive. She went straight to her own room to dress; she was saved any embarrassing choice of toilettes, for she had only two, one her best, the other a plain black net, and she would not wear black to receive him. Her sisters had a maid between them, but she never cared for anyone to help her, or to be dependent on anyone for such essential things as dressing and hair-doing. She took out a white dress and laid by it her only jewels—some pearls left her by her grandmother—and the two tea roses. That was all she had to aid her, but Regina knew it was enough. She washed her face in the hottest water, so that it came out clear and white, with a warm glow in the cheeks, and then piled up loosely, so that all its natural waves had their full play, the shining masses of her hair. Then the dress over her head by one quick movement and fastened down her bosom, and at the waist, under veils of tulle; the roses slipped in her hair and belt; the pearls clasped round her throat, and she had finished dressing. She was ready, and free to sit down and look at her vision in the glass, which she did.

How bright her eyes were!—they looked like great sapphires; and how red her lips! People might easily think they were painted. The skin, how transparent and soft, like the untouched petal of a white anemone. And her arms, they gleamed, milk-colour, amongst the tulle.

Beyond her window the light was fading in the deep rose of the west; pale violet shadows were stealing up from the copse and enveloping all the garden with the peace of evening. As her glance wandered from her own bright face to the serene outside, a feeling came to her that that day closed a definite period of her life. Eighteen years were now accomplished—years of thought, of work, of learning, of contemplation, and they were over. The thought brought no sadness with it, only joy. Whatever the next period of time brought with it, she was ready, eager to go forward, to meet the embrace of life. That it might mean merely the staying on and on at home in Stossop, as it had done for nearly thirty unhappy girls in the village, never occurred to her. Intuitively she knew she would escape from the narrow, cramping existence of her home. It was only the way and the manner of escape that, she felt, was unknown to her.

Full of dominant energy, fear of that way or manner never touched her. Of such are the elect of the world. The poor, ignorant, helpless, wilting mass of Stossop's spinsters is but extravagant Nature's waste material thrown out on the dust-heaps of time.

The light crush of the gravel under carriage wheels came to her ears, footsteps outside her door and on the stairs, voices ascending from the garden. She heard the commotion, and very softly stole out of her room to the oak rail round the well, that went down straight to the hall below, and looked over. The guest was arriving. The footman was bringing in some light luggage. She could see her father and mother both standing there by the door, waiting, and catch a glimpse of her sisters close by the drawing-room door. No one thought of, or noticed, her, and she leant over the balustrade facing the entrance. Then he came in and she saw him. Much as she had expected, much as report had led her to expect, the reality was more than she had ever pictured. Straight and tall, with a wonderful elegance of figure that not even travelling clothes could conceal, he entered the hall and took off his hat, standing without it as he greeted her parents. Entranced, the girl looked down upon the perfectly shaped head, with its mass of thick black hair, waving a little as it rose from the smooth, wide forehead, on which, to her downward view, the eyebrows seemed extraordinarily dark and striking, the eyes she could not see, but the fine, straight, beautifully carved nose and chin, the turn of the head on the long neck, the line of the cheek, the colour of the skin, a warm, transparent tan, all seemed to the dazzled eyes of the girl to make up a vision of remarkable beauty; she heard him speaking, and the quiet, well-bred tones came up to her as something totally different from any voice she had ever heard, from the curate's sanctimonious twang, from the doctor's brusque, curt utterances, from the Latin master's guttural pedantry. Musical, even, perfect, like sounds from another world, the waves of air carrying his voice came up to her.

He stood talking, while his valet brought in what seemed to the girl a great deal of yellow hand-luggage and put it down in the hall. Then she saw her mother motion to her sisters, and they came up, looking very beautiful, as Regina thought, without a touch of envy. She did not fear their beauty, and merely rejoiced that he should see what presentable sisters she had. Miss Marlow was in pale pink satin, against which her brown head, twined round with pearls, contrasted well. Violet Marlow wore a dark blue muslin, like the ultramarine of the sea, and her blond hair and snowy skin seemed fair as its foam. Regina saw the look of interest flash across the man's face as he turned to them; she noted her parents' pride as the presentation was made. Then there was more light talking and laughter, and Regina simply marvelled at the sweetness of her sisters' voices. Was that the same organ as the one with which Jane Marlow had called to her from the window? Was Violet's voice now really the same as the one with which she wrangled and argued over the Rectory dinner-table every night? Then she ceased to notice them, and her ears went back to listening to the man's quiet replies, while her eyes drank and drank of all the grace and wonder of his presence. Then suddenly there was a movement towards the stairs, her parents stood aside, the girls drew back, and Everest, followed by his valet, came upstairs.

Regina, soundless as a white shadow, turned away and went back into her room, softly closing the door. Her eyes were suffused, yet shining like stars on a rainy night; her face was full of colour; her breast rose and fell so rapidly that all her white muslin drapery quivered.

"How wonderful, how delightful he is," she murmured to herself. "It is nice to know there are human beings like that, that they are not all hideous and harsh-voiced, and humpy-backed, and badly dressed as they are in Stossop. He is perfect, and he has come here, and I can love him."

To meet one that you can love; what a privilege that is. She stood for some time thinking over that, lost in the contemplation of that great truth. It is so easy for a woman to find those that will love her, so difficult to find one she can love. For woman being the superior animal in every way, in beauty, in vitality, in intellect and charm, almost any woman is good enough for a man, whereas there is only one man here and there that is good enough for a woman.

After a pause, she moved over to her long glass and looked at herself. She was quite satisfied. There was nothing more to do, and she threw herself into an easy-chair, and called up that vision of him behind her closed lids as he entered her cordially hated home.

When the gong sounded she went down, and as they were all assembled in the dining-room, and she was the last to enter, all eyes turned upon her as she did so. She hesitated for a moment by the door, and Everest thought, with a sudden startled interest, what an attractive picture she made. Her soft, snow-white draperies fell about a figure tall and slender and supple, harmonious in all its lines as a beautiful melody is in its sounds. Three rows of glistening pearls encircled a round throat, whiter than themselves; above was her pink-tinted face, crowned by its fair clustering hair. But the arresting power was in her eyes; excited, pleased, animated, they were wide open, full of light and fire, and as he rose and approached her they gazed upon him with a sort of rapture.

Her two sisters glanced at her in angry surprise, and then at each other.

Her father got up and presented Everest blandly: "Regina, this is Mr. Everest Lanark. My youngest daughter, Regina."

Everest took a very soft, warm hand in his for a moment, and while he did so, the fragrance of the glorious tea-rose blossoms, one in her hair, another at her breast, came to him; his eyes fell on them, and always afterwards her image, in his mind, was associated with those golden roses.

A moment later they were all seated at the table: Everest on the right of Mrs. Marlow and next to Miss Marlow, and opposite Miss Violet Marlow and the Rector, Regina at the end of the table, on his side, where he could not well see her, except by bending forward.

She did not care. She was quite content. The dinner went admirably. Everest, pleased at the proximity of so much youthful beauty, and with a really clever if extremely narrow man, in the Rector opposite, to talk to, appeared quite to enjoy it. At its conclusion the four women rose; the men were left together.

Everest did not drink much, but he tried the Rector's old claret; he did not smoke either, but his host did, so Everest took a cigarette with him.

Regina slipped away up to her own room. She was afraid to risk being alone in the drawing-room with her sisters, lest her roses should be torn off, her hair pulled down or her toilette suffer in some way at their hands. Before the Rector they usually kept up some outward seemliness of conduct. So she waited until she heard Everest and her father come out of the dining-room and enter the drawing-room before she descended. She found Everest already seated between her two sisters, and she passed over to a far corner of the room to a low chair by the piano, and sat down there. She thought Everest would not be the man she felt sure he was if he could stand long the united conversational powers of Jane and Violet Marlow.

Little scraps of their talk came over to her and amused her: "strips of flannel," "had to keep her bed for a week, and mother took her guava jelly every day." Regina guessed that Everest was being entertained with an account of some of Stossop's sick poor.

He glanced her way many times, and she fancied a weary look grew upon his face, as the poor continued very sick, and Miss Marlow's methods of treating their various ailments became more and more detailed. Neither sister allowed the conversation to pause for a moment, and when one showed signs of failing the other took it up with commendable energy. But few things in this world prevented Everest from doing what he wanted to do, and certainly two country girls talking to him was not one of them. He wanted to approach Regina and speak to her, and as he found the sisters would not stop their chatter he rose in the middle of it.

"I want to speak to your sister for a moment," he said merely, and left them, crossing the room to where Regina sat, and drawing an easy-chair close to hers. She looked up, and the same enthusiastic welcome shone in her eyes as on his presentation.

"What were you doing all day?" he asked, letting his eyes rest on the youthful fairness of the throat, where the pearls gleamed in the lamplight. He felt quite confident he would not be bored with the Stossop poor in this quarter.

"I went to church in the morning, which I hate, and which always makes me realise what wretched things all these religions are. Then after lunch I lay for quite a long time in the garden, gazing at the white nimbi in the sky. That helps a little to counteract the effect of the church service. Then I walked to the sea, and visited a rose garden there. It is perfectly beautiful—it has a magic I cannot explain; you must come and see it yourself. I looked over all the roses, and then I sat down and read till the sunset came and disturbed me. I had to look at that, and then I walked home to dress for dinner."

She spoke lightly, easily, her warm, ardent gaze on his face, her soft lips smiling. Her tones were like music. Her way of talking quite different from the heavy, assiduous speechifying of her sisters.

"What were you reading?" he asked, his eyes fixed on the brilliant, changing, responsive countenance.

"I was finishing the Cyclops: it is not a good play, but I have read all Euripides except that, and I wanted to complete him."

She spoke quite simply, and without any affectation or desire to impress him. Things one does oneself rarely seem very great accomplishments to oneself, and Regina had read Greek for so long that a new play seemed no more than a new novel to her.

"Do you read it in the original?" Everest asked, raising the dark arches of his brows, and to the girl, as she met his admiring gaze from under them, it seemed as if he were lifting her heart out of her bosom with them.

She laughed. "Yes, I don't like translations at all. Ever since I saw that Byron had translated Catullus' Ode to Juventus as an Ode to 'Eleanor' I have fled from all of them."

"You seem to be tremendously clever!"

"Am I?" she asked, smiling up at him. "I am so glad you think so. I am very fond of learning and all the arts. Are you? Painting, music, poetry, sculpture. They are the soul of life, I think. What should we do without them? Think if we had only in life the Church, dusters and the poor!"

Everest laughed, and so did she. "It does sound an awful combination! Yes, I think with you art is the one thing that brings a little heaven on earth. It is the only true religion, the only true elevator of that poor wretch—man. I am never so happy, and I never feel so good and so charitable, as when I am painting."

"Do you paint?" asked Regina, with a fiery interest in her glowing eyes. "So do I. What are your subjects, and what do you paint in?—water colours or oil?"

"Oils. I do anything that catches my fancy—a head, a figure, a landscape, anything that is a little unusual. I hate the commonplace."

"In Africa I suppose you found so many subjects that were unusual: tropical trees and wonderful plants and beautiful black women."

Everest looked back at the delicately coloured face, of which her interest and excitement made the skin glow more transparently every minute.

"You have great intuition to feel that the women are beautiful," he answered; "most people just group them all together under the name of blacks, and are so blind mentally and physically as not to be able to see their beauty. There is a race in the Soudan, of which the beauty could not be surpassed. The colour is coal-black, but form and line are perfect, both in face and body. Then another race has absolutely perfect forms, though the face is of the negro type. Never anywhere else could one see more gloriously modelled shoulders and arms than those women have."

At that moment the footman brought in coffee, and while they were taking it the Rector came up, and the talk became general.

Soon after Everest rose, with the excuse that he must not disturb their early country hours, and said "Good-night." Regina, watching him as he got up and stood, felt an electric wave of pleasure pass through her from head to foot. The well-cut and fitting evening clothes displayed all the admirable lines of his figure. The slimness and the grace of it were a revelation to her. The light from the centre swinging lamp, falling on the pale well-bred face, showed its perfection of carving, its look of power and intellect. As he said good-night to her, she gazed upon him, wide-eyed and in silence, and Everest, reading her thoughts, felt amused and pleased.

When he reached his rooms he turned the key in the lock and then threw himself into the arm-chair by the open window. The soft air of the June night came in, full of fragrance, from the Rectory garden. In the copse beyond, the nightingales here and there burst into little trills and long calls, and then were silent again, preparing for their unbroken, tireless melody of the later hours. Everest sat very still in his chair, one hand hanging idly over its arm, his even brows contracted, thinking. Before coming down to the Rectory he had made up his mind very decidedly that he would not allow this visit to draw him into any complicated ties with the daughters of the house. Marriage was far from his wishes or plans at that moment, and any relations with anybody almost equally distasteful, since they would rob him of that peace of mind and rest which his doctor had told him were essential, and which he had come to the country rectory to find. He had heard that the Misses Marlow were handsome girls of the ordinary type, and the ordinary type, he knew, had no attraction for him. Certainly after the conversation of the evening, he was convinced of his perfect safety with either Jane or Violet. But Regina; at the first meeting of the eyes, at the sight of that sweet enthusiasm of admiring welcome in hers, at the touch of her hand, full of electric fire, he had realised instantly that there was every danger here. And so strongly did this feeling envelop him again when they said good-night that he felt inclined, now, to summon his valet, and tell him to repack everything for a return journey on the morrow. But the thought of the surprise, the disappointment, the hurt feeling he would occasion checked him.

His gaze wandered round his apartment. His quick eyes told him at once how much personal care and pains had been bestowed on the room, to give it the particular air of welcoming comfort it possessed.

It was not the hands of servants that had looped up so gracefully with bows of lilac ribbon the curtains of his bed, nor arranged all those books of reference and the latest weekly papers on his writing-table.

He took up idly the silver pen, put ready in the inkstand tray, and saw it had "Violet" engraved upon it, and a handsome leather blotting-book, filled with every writing necessity, even to stamps of many denominations, bore its owner's monogram, "J. M."

These things spoke to him, though many men might not have even noticed them, and many others only noticed them to jeer. How kindly old John Marlow had received him; and his wife—what pains she had taken probably in thinking out that excellent dinner they had given him, and the girls were all so pretty and fresh and eager to please.

It would go against the grain of Everest's nature to wound them all by suddenly leaving. Whatever excuses he made, they would still believe his departure was due to some error of their own. But an intuitive voice within him warned him that if the Devon coast was just the place to eradicate the traces of African fever, from which he was suffering, Stossop Rectory and Regina were not the best adjuncts to it.

As he sat there, undecided, in the silence, the soft sound of a casement above his own being set open came to him, and without any particular intent or reason in his mind he rose and went to his own window and looked out. The moon had just climbed above the copse, and sent a warm, pale light across the sleeping garden. Everest looked up, and there above him was the girl who was in his thoughts. She had opened her window, apparently to look at the night, for her face was turned towards the rising moon, and, quite unconscious, seemingly, of any spectator, she leaned a little forward. Of her face Everest could see nothing except the under part of her chin, but the light fell full on the round column of her neck, upon the white expanse of her bosom, upon the perfect arms supporting her, as her hands clasped the sill. Its pale radiance invested the dazzling whiteness of the skin with a peculiar and mystic brilliance, and, accustomed though he was to women's beauty in any and every form, Everest drew in his breath sharply with surprised admiration. She had taken off her evening dress, and the low bodice she now wore possessed only two narrow straps holding it to the shoulders, and passed below the snowy swell of the breast, leaving it and the soft modelling of the arms and shoulders all revealed. Yet the silver light, falling down and over and round her, seemed to clothe her in shining armour. To any man, even to the most material, it must have seemed a vision more of heaven than of earth, and to Everest, with his artist's eye and mind, the sight had a magic and a charm he could hardly define to himself. Silent, almost breathless, he stood watching her, as silent and absorbed she herself stood watching the moon slowly mount in the purple sky.

Then suddenly she turned her head and looked down, why, Everest could not tell, since he had made no sound. For one instant their eyes met. He saw the beautiful arms bend at the elbows, with the change of position; the face, a dark oval now, as it turned downwards, hung over his; he saw the silver light illuminate all the masses of the fair hair round it, for one second, that leapt by him into eternity all too quickly; then she vanished noiselessly. The casement remained open, but the light fell now only on its glittering panes. For a long time the man waited by the window, his heart beating hard, but she did not come back, and at last he turned away to his room and commenced his undressing. The nightingales, perfectly attuned, now began to pour out in the stillness the raptures of their song. Everest's face was dark as he moved about the room.

All resolve, all desire to go on the morrow had left him. A new and a stronger one was waking in his veins.

He turned down the lamp burning beneath its pretty, rose-coloured shade and got into the bed, so carefully prepared for him, with lace-edged sheet and silken coverings.

As he laid his head down, on the pillow trimmed by Miss Marlow's own hands a murmur passed his lips:

"Well, I'll stay, and risk it."