I trod close in Mrs Bowater's track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat. Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in their play over my wilderness. Mr Anon looked peculiar, standing alone there.

Having bidden him a gracious good-evening, Mrs Bowater after a long, ruminating glance at us, decided that she would "take a stroll through the grounds." We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear, dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris, fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut.

"Well," he said at last, almost wearily. "It has been a long waiting."

I was unprepared for this sighing. "It has indeed," I replied. "But it is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you did not answer my letter, at least not the last."

My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had thought to make, forgotten.

"And now you are here."

"Yes," I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, "and that's pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden it is up there—geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows, windows. They are wonderfully kind to me—but I don't much love it."

"Then why stay?" he smiled. "Still, you are, at least, safely out of her clutches."

"Clutches!" I hated the way we were talking. "Thank you very much. You forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care of myself." He made no answer.

"You are so gloomy," I continued. "So—oh, I don't know—about everything. It's because you are always cooped up in one place, I suppose. One must take the world—a little—as it is, you know. Why don't you go away; travel; see things? Oh, if I were a man."

His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come scuttling out in a silly longing excitement—for this. Why, I felt more lonely and helpless under Wanderslore's evening sky than ever I had been in my cedar-wood privacy in No. 2.

"I mean it, I mean it," I broke out suddenly. "You domineer over me. You pamper me up with silly stories—'trailing clouds of glory,' I suppose. They are not true. It's every one for himself in this world, I can tell you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress. Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help me——"

He turned irresolutely. "They have dipped you pretty deep in the dye-pot."

"And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?"

"I mean," and he faced me, "that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?"

"And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up that wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it."

He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.

"You don't seem to understand," I went on; "it's the waste—the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can't talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched."

"There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should you? But that's the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport."

"Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage?"

"Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars," he sneered miserably. "Still we are sharing the same language now."

The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey—called me back.

"S-sh!" I whispered, caught up with delight. "A nightjar! Listen. Let's go and look."

I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature's enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue—how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.

We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back into memory. "Once, did you ever hear it?" I whispered close to him, "there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a book. And when it was asked, 'Are you a good spirit or a bad?' it made no answer, but vanished, the book said—I remember the very words—'with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.' With a curious perfume," I repeated, "and most melodious twang. There now, would you like me to go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that old Death-thing to catch me. Even if I cannot love you, you are part of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn't that be enough?"

His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer thrummed on.

I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding eyes. "What can I give you—only to be your peace? I do assure you it is yours. But I haven't the secret of knowing what half the world means. Look at me. Is it not all a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am."

So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk, seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was gone. The interruption only hastened me on.

"Still, still listen," I implored: "if Time would but cease a while and let me breathe."

"There, there," he muttered. "I was unkind. A filthy jealousy."

"But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts—my imagination, with you; isn't that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like—oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you? No, no; it's only a story—why, even all this green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone."

My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge. "Wake!" I tugged at his hand. "Look!" Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a glow-worm burned: "Is this a—a Stranger's face?"

He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely sorrowful indulgence. "A Stranger's? How else could it be, if I love you?"

Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to some one who could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I looped it back. "Oh, but you see—haven't I told you?—I can't love you. Perhaps; I don't know.... What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose," I went on, "I like myself that much," and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, "then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!"—and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. "Now do you understand?"

"Oh, my dear, my dear," he said, and smiled into my eyes.

I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me—and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.

"Then I have made you a little—a little less unhappy?" I asked him, and hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.

He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into—how can I explain my meaning except by saying—Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and for ever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so close upon the confines of existence as that?

It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.

"Wake, wake!" it called in my ear. "The woman is looking for you. We must go."

My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into my body. And there beneath evening's vacancy of twilight showed the transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.

"Wake!" he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I stared at him out of a dream.