Without any further conversation the two men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room. Osborne's heart was too full for speech. He cast at Marie one look of love and devotion, into which stole an unfamiliar fear. He moved over to where Mrs Parkinson sat, and taking a chair, fell into conversation with her. There was no more music that night. All had been impressed too deeply by that song to care for any other. A second must prove an anticlimax. Osborne, in that one short glance, saw on Marie's face an expression he had never observed there before. The eyes had grown deep and dark and sad and spirituelle. Her face was slightly paler than usual, and her hands drooped with unaccustomed languor. He had seen her in many phases, but never yet so inert. She looked subdued, abstracted. She had thrown such fervour into that song that her physical resources were diminished. Her spirit had entered upon a new phase, as though the prayer of the song had been heard and new avenues of spiritual view had been opened to her. The guests did not stay late. Then the Osbornes, with Miss Gordon, drove back to Peter's Row. When they were in the cab George asked Marie, 'How on earth did Mrs Parkinson know you were here?' In a very simple way. It appears that at the same boarding-house I lived when in New York a Mrs Burns also stayed. She and I were a good deal together, and as we were both coming to London, we exchanged our London addresses. She arrived in London three days ago. She called on the Parkinsons, who are friends of hers, and whom she had mentioned to me. Of course I did not recognise the name of Ethel's husband, for I had never heard it. She told the Parkinsons the day before yesterday she intended calling on me. Mrs Parkinson was struck by my name, and so it all came out.' George mused awhile at the strange ways things come about. Then he said, 'You were at the same table with Mrs Burns at New York. You visited to-day where she visited two days before. She, a perfect stranger to you, is the means of bringing you and your old friend together. At the same table sat Mr Nevill, whom you meet here accidentally, and you sit at the same table with him.' 'By the way,' said Marie, 'don't you think we have treated Mr Nevill very badly? I never thought of him till now.' 'After all,' said George, following his thought, 'to those who move about much the great world is no larger than a parish is to those who do not move about at all.' 'Don't you think we have treated Mr Nevill very badly?' she repeated. 'I really never thought of him until now.' 'I did not think of him either. What do you say, Kate?' 'I think we have not been very considerate.' 'But, Kate, have you thought of how wretchedly we have been treating him?' 'Yes.' Marie looked at George, rubbed the third finger of her left hand where, under her glove, lay the ring with five rubies. 'I beg your pardon,' said George. 'Did you speak?' 'How stupid men are!' said Marie, by way of comment on George's want of intelligence in not knowing she meant to call attention to Kate's vague but significant answer. Kate had often thought during the afternoon and evening that the cool way in which they had ignored him would give him additional cause to fancy they all--she among the number--considered him a fool. She had often during the evening seen, in her imagination, his plain face full of humiliation and pain at the way they had forgotten him who had hitherto formed a member of their parties and schemes. When they arrived at the boarding-house they learned Mr Nevill had gone out for the evening, and would not be in till midnight, or past midnight. 'So,' said Miss Gordon, 'we cannot apologise until to-morrow.' Neither brother nor sister said anything. When Kate got to her room that night she found a note on her dressing-table. It had come through the post. She looked long at the postmark. There was only one, 'E.C.,' of that day's date. She looked again at the writing. She felt perfectly certain she had never seen it before. With an expression of surprise and curiosity on her face she opened the envelope and took out the enclosure. It proved to be the undomiciled, undated, unsigned lines running as follows:-- 'I am in great distress. I fear your avoidance of me since morning has been the result of some foolish things I said to you about what you thought of me. You must not mind me. You must attach no meaning or importance to these most random wicked words of mine. You know I am an inveterate talker. If my talk of to-day has made any bad impression, I beg of you, for God's sake, to give me a chance of removing it! There is no woman on earth I respect more than you; no woman on earth whose good opinion is essential to me but yours, for I love you! I implore you to give me a chance, just one, of redeeming my stupid blunder. If you do not give me this one chance, I do not know what will become of me. Forget my flippant manner. I am as terribly in earnest now as ever man was. You will answer this. I cannot look at you again until I know I am forgiven. Will you write as soon as you can to me, care of Messrs Stainsforth & Co., Bankers, Lombard Street? I shall tell the housemaid here, as though from you, that if any letters come for you this evening they are to be brought to your room, so you may be saved the inconvenience of reading this in the presence of anyone.'

That night George Osborne once more found himself too excited for sleep. The day had been thick with incidents, full of conflicting emotions. The anxious morning, the solemn betrothal, the peace following it, the sharp shock of meeting Parkinson once more, the introduction to that man by his sweetheart, the strange feeling of reassurance and peace which had come upon him during the early part of his visit to Parkinson's house, the subsequent despair, followed by the cry that went up from him when he heard the plea for mercy sung by that superb voice, and the later discovery that this voice was Marie's--all crowded into one day, had left him nervous and tremulous and wakeful. He walked heavily to the window, drew back the curtains, raised up the blind, and looked out. Beneath him lay miles of dark roofs lit by the broad full moon. Fantastic gables and weird-looking vanes broke up the dull monotony of the view. Here and there deep chasms of shadow stretched right and left, leading to large pools of intense darkness where the streets broadened into squares. High above the plain of roofs and gables and vanes, like fair white spars, rose the steeples and towers and spires of a thousand churches. The peaceful beauty of the night melted his heart and soothed his troubled brain like an anodyne. All was peace abroad; and whose peace could it be but God's? How the white moonlight swept worry and doubt and tumult away! In the light of day man might lift impious eyes to heaven, for he was drunk with a foolish sense of security and importance. In the dark of night man was exposed to a thousand unmanly fears. But who could look upon the moonlight and not feel the assurance that God was near, and was the friend of man? Moonlight was the white altar-cloth of earth, and when it was spread the heart of man must send up the incense of worship. Now was not the hour to sing Miserere but Laudamus. Here was no oppressive consciousness of sin, no abject pleading for mercy. Here were simple worship and confidence. No repining, no doubt, no superstitious fears or vague misgivings; no arrogance, but a full quiet sense of protection and future advancement, and of worship and love. Much has been said about the moonlight and lovers, but it seemed more fit for solitary commune between man and his Maker. Why was not life all moonlight? Why had we ever the fiery heat and passion of noon? What fools men are to allow themselves to be dragged this way and that at the beck of every passion, at the call of every party, at the decree of every sect? Were not this world here around, this beautiful moon, and the all-just God in heaven above, enough for the heart and soul of man? Ample. What could be added to these three things? After all, there may be much in the quietist's ideas. A man might do worse, provided he had no home ties, than spend his life in the vineyards and on the olive-clad slopes of Mount Athos. It was late when Osborne pulled down the blind, drew the curtains, and faced his room once more. The gas was burning brightly: its flame had warmed the room. Still he felt no inclination to go to bed. There was an old-fashioned elbow-chair by the dressing-table, and on one side of the dressing-table the books lent him by Nevill; on the other side those lent him that night by Parkinson. He took the latter pile, consisting of five books, and, holding them pressed together between his right and left hand, he read the backs carefully. He should never be able to look through these books with more unconcern than this night, the night of the betrothal, a scathless visit to Parkinson, that calm and peaceful commune with God above the moonlit city. Three o'clock struck, and he read on. Four, five, six, and still he did not rise from that chair. At seven he had finished the book, and at seven he rose, went to the window, and once more pulled back the curtains and drew up the blind. The moon had set. The sun had not yet risen. 'All is dark,' he thought, 'all is dark. This is my second vigil within a few days. My second vigil. All is dark. I suppose Marie is sleeping still. The city is slowly waking. I can hear the mutter of traffic, but I can see nothing, for all is dark. 'I wonder where the song is Marie sung last night? Quenched in this dense darkness. How strange to stand here and listen to the waking notes of this vast city! Gog and Magog are turning in their dreams. What a wonderful city this is! Its wakening cries are louder than the noonday voice of Stratford; but I miss the delicate tones of the river. 'The birds are still sleeping in the trees around our house at Stratford, and mother and Alice are sleeping too. In Stratford now you could not hear a sound but the soft secret lispings of the Avon. An hour before the dawn a river speaks as at no other time of day or night. Often in coming home from fishing I have stood to listen to the river beginning to speak. The first voice after sunset does not come from near where you stand, but from round a bend or some part you are not looking at. You think it is a late bird until you weigh the sound in your ear, and then you find no bird could touch so delicate a note, reach so weird a meaning. Then all at once a hundred soft whispers steal along the shore and from the surface of the stream, and you wait and listen minute after minute in the hope or fear the whisperings will shape themselves in some human speech. You wait until disappointment yields to despair. Then you turn to go. You have taken only one step, when you hear the river saying distinctly, "Stay, stay." You remain immoveable for awhile, only to be tantalised by whisperings and mutterings less unlike human speech than before. 'I suppose a man never had a better mother or better sister than I. Nothing in the world keeps a man so clear of that most vulgar of all mental vices, cynicism, as a good mother and good sisters. It is good women who keep men in well-ordered mind. Men are not afraid of telling their weaknesses to other men, but it hurts and degrades a man when evil news of him come to ears at home. There is one sure way of making any man careless of his conduct: make his mother and sisters believe he is not what he should be. A man's wife is theoretically his equal; but in practice who ever saw this theory hold? She must govern him or he her. 'There's Jim Truscot at Stratford. He is a hunchback and lame, and eight years younger than I. I have known him all my life. When he was a boy and I a lad, I used to watch him as he looked at the other boys playing cricket. He would clap his hands and shout when a ball was well hit or a player well stumped. No one had such judgment or knowledge of the game as poor Jim Truscot, and yet he could never swing a bat or bowl a ball. Often have I watched the boy, and grieved for him, until the tears would run into my eyes; and I would have handed the boy the bat and given up the game, if poor Jim might play one game. Jim is at home in Stratford now, hardly awake yet. Yes, poor Jim is no doubt lying asleep now in Stratford, his deformed withered legs stretched out, his misshapen breast heaving quickly! Poor Jim! perhaps now he does not care for cricket as much as formerly. Perhaps the spirit that inhabited the poor tenement has now fallen down in worship before some young girl of pastoral and woodland Warwickshire. If this were so with the man, what had been the boy's sorrow? A passing cloud compared to a life-long gloom. 'Far away there, under the pall of lingering darkness, ran the little river, now whispering as it had never whispered at any other time. The sounds came closer together, there was a hurry, a confusion in the tones. The sounds were tremulous and the accents full of fear. They came nearer to speaking a human tongue. The river seemed anxious to communicate some secret of vital importance. It appeared to make a final effort to render itself intelligible before dawn came in the broad east and silenced the voice of the river. 'Now I listen once more to these whispers. I have found the key to the tongue they speak, I know now what they have tried to say and could not. It was,-- '"Fools! Fools, you men! You think you are of some importance to the Creator. You are nothing. You are like us, merely the result of the great current of life striking the shore. While the river flows by banks, you have voice, as we. But in the great ocean beyond the shores of time you shall be like us, dumb. You are no better than we, or these rushes here, in anything you can show, except that you enjoy more privileges. Fools, why should you not be content? Is it not much to be lords of earth, without aspiring to be peers of heaven?" 'Has it all come to this? Has it all come to this at last? Mother and Alice away in Stratford, are they nothing more than ripples on the stream of life? If my mother does not get a reward on earth for all her goodness, will she get no reward for it hereafter? Monstrous thought! Will poor Jim Truscot go into his coffin, and find in his coffin nothing but nothingness? Was that poor misshapen creature brought into the world merely to be the sport of Fate? No, no; this cannot be. I will not believe it.' The cold grey dawn of midwinter was now in the east. 'And here, under this roof, sleeps my gentle sister Kate, and all the good and kindly people of the place. Are they all but ripples on the stream? 'And she, my Marie, she who is dearer than all the world beside, is she to be to me only for the span of this poor vulgar world, wherein love and time are broken up by the round of petty daily cares? Am I to clasp her in this world only to lose her in the next? I, who spent all my youth in visions of perfected love hereafter! I who held that we were sent on earth merely to learn love, that we might hereafter enjoy it in the peace as unencumbered souls!' He paused awhile, drew back from the window. He put his hand to his head in a bewildered way. He took down his hands, crying out, in a low, resolute voice,-- 'No, no. No, no, no. That is absurd. Quite absurd. I must be losing my reason. Staying up at night is bad, everyone says, and everyone is always right. You may stay up a night now and then, but not two nights in such quick succession as these two. 'I can't sleep, and I don't want to read or to think. What should I do? 'Go out for a walk and get the jaded look off my face before my love, my Marie, comes down. Yes; that is a good idea.' He changed his clothes, stole quietly down the stairs, took his overcoat off the hall rack, and went out. The morning was damp, and raw, and cold. He had no definite intention. He wandered about the streets aimlessly. He did not know whither he went. He did not care what road he took. He simply wanted to kill time and thought by walking. The streets had not awoke yet. Life beat in languid pulses at the crossings where great courses of traffic crossed one another. Odd cabs rolled by, carrying figures, well muffled up, to and from early trains. The 'All hot!' men still lingered in important thoroughfares. London would not be awake for an hour. London would not be at work for two. At the usual hour the breakfast-bell rang. Shortly afterwards it was found Mr Osborne and Mr Nevill had gone out and had not returned, and that the latter had left word he should not be back for the day.