The dawn was just faintly making itself felt among the trees of Oakguard when Philippa Renshaw, restless as she often was on these summer nights, perceived, as she leaned from her open window, a figure almost as slender as herself standing motionless at the edge of one of the terraces and looking up at the house. There was no light in Philippa’s room, so that she was able to watch this figure without risk of being herself observed. She was certain at once in her own mind of its identity, and she took it immediately for granted that Brand was even now on his way to meet the young girl at the spot where she now saw her standing.

She experienced, therefore, a certain surprise and even annoyance—for she would have liked to have witnessed this encounter—when, instead of remaining where she stood, the girl suddenly slipped away like a ghostly shadow and merged herself among the park-trees. Philippa remained for some minutes longer at the window peering intently into the grey obscurity and wondering whether after all she had been mistaken and it was one of the servants of the house. There was one of the Oakguard maids addicted to walking in her sleep, and she confessed to herself that it was quite possible she had been misled by her own morbid fancy into supposing that the nocturnal wanderer was Linda Herrick.

She returned to her bed after a while and tried to sleep, but the idea that it was really Linda she had seen and that the young girl was even now roaming about the grounds like a disconsolate phantom, took possession of her mind. She rose once more and cautiously pulling down the blind and drawing the curtains began hurriedly to dress herself, taking the precaution to place the solitary candle which she used behind a screen so that no warning of her wakefulness should reach the person she suspected.

Opening the door and moving stealthily down the passage, she paused for a moment at the threshold of her brother’s room. All was silent within. Smiling faintly to herself, she turned the handle with exquisite precaution and glided into the room. No! She was right in her conjecture. The place was without an occupant, and the bed, it appeared, had not been slept in. She went out, closing the door silently behind her.

Her mother’s room was opposite Brand’s and the fancy seized her to enter that also. She entered it, and stepped, softly as a wandering spirit, to her mother’s side. Mrs. Renshaw was lying in an uneasy posture with one arm stretched across the counterpane and her head close to the edge of the bed. She was breathing heavily but was not in a deep sleep. Every now and then her fingers spasmodically closed and unclosed, and from her lips came broken inarticulate words. The pallid light of the early dawn made her face seem older than Philippa had ever seen it. By her side on a little table lay an open book, but it was still too dark for the intruder to discern what this book was.

The daughter stood for some minutes in absolute rigidity, gazing upon the sleeper. Her face as she gazed wore an expression so complicated, so subtle, that the shrewdest observer seeking to interpret its meaning would have been baffled. It was not malignant. It certainly was not tender. It might have been compared to the look one could conceive some heathen courtesan in the days of early Christianity casting upon a converted slave.

Uneasily conscious, as people in their sleep often are, without actually waking, of the alien presence so near her, Mrs. Renshaw suddenly moved round in her bed and with a low moaning utterance, settled herself to sleep with her face to the window. It was a human name she had uttered then. Philippa was sure of that, but it was a name completely strange to the watcher of her mother’s unconsciousness.

Passing from the room as silently as she had entered, the girl ran lightly down the staircase, picked up a cloak in the hall, and let herself out of the front door.

Meanwhile, through the gradually lifting shadows, Linda with rapid and resolute steps was hastening across the park to the portion of the avenue where grew the great cedar-trees. This was the place to which her first instinct had called her. It was only an after-thought, due to cooler reason that had caused her to deviate from this and approach the house itself.

As she advanced through the dew-drenched grass, silvery now in the faint light, she felt that vague indescribable sensation which all living creatures, even those scourged by passion, are bound to feel, at the first palpable touch of dawn. Perfumes and odours that could not be expressed in words, and that seemed to have no natural origin, came to the girl on the wind which went sighing past her. This—so at least Linda vaguely felt—was not the west wind any more. It was not any ordinary wind of day or night. It was the dawn wind, the breath of the earth herself, indrawn with sweet sharp ecstasy at the delicate terror of the coming of the sun-god.

As she approached the avenue where the trunks of the cedars rose dark against the misty white light, she was suddenly startled by the flapping wings of an enormous heron which, mounting up in front of her out of the shadow of the trees, went sailing away across the park, its extended neck and outstretched legs outlined against the eastern sky. She passed in among the shadows from which the heron had emerged, and there, as though he had been waiting for her only a few moments, was Brand Renshaw.

With one swift cry she flung herself into his arms and they clung together as if from an eternity of separation. In her flimsy dress wet with mist she seemed like a creature evoked by some desperate prayer of earth-passion. Her cheeks and breast were cold to his touch, but the lips that answered his kisses were hot as if with burning fever. She clung to him as though some abysmal gulf might any moment open beneath their feet. She nestled against him, she twined herself around him. She took his head between her hands and with her cold fingers she caressed his face. So thinly was she clad that he could feel her heart beating as if it were his own.

“I knew you were calling me,” she gasped at last. “I felt it—I felt it in my flesh. Oh, my only love, I’m all yours—all, all yours! Take me, hold me, save me from every one! Hold me, hold me, my only love, hold me tight from all of them!”

They swayed together as she clung to him and, lifting her up from the ground he carried her, still wildly kissing him, into the deeper shadow of the great cedars. Exhausted at last by the extremity of her passion, she hung limp in his arms, her face white as the white light which now flooded the eastern horizon. He laid her down then at the foot of one of the largest trees and bending over her pushed back the hair from her forehead as if she had been a tired child.

By some powerful law of his strange nature, the very intensity of her passion for him and her absolute yielding to his will calmed and quieted his own desire. She was his now, at a touch, at a movement; but he would as soon have hurt an infant as have embraced her then. His emotion at that moment was such as never again in his life he was destined to experience. He felt as though, untouched as she was, she belonged to him, body and soul. He felt as though they two together were isolated, separated, divided, from the whole living world. Beneath the trunks of those black-foliaged cedars they seemed to be floating in a mystic ship over a great sea of filmy white waves.

He bent down and kissed her forehead, and under his kiss, chaste as the kiss a father might give to a little girl, she closed her eyes and lay motionless and still, a faint flickering smile of infinite contentment playing upon her lips.

They were in this position—the girl’s hand resting passively in his—and he bending over her, when through an eastward gap between the trees the sun rose above the mist. It sent towards them a long blood-coloured finger that stained the cedar trunks and caused the strangely shaped head of the stooping man to look as if it had been dipped in blood. It made the girl’s mouth scarlet-red and threw an indescribable flush over her face, a flush delicate and diaphanous as that which tinges the petals of wild hedge roses.

Linda opened her eyes and Brand leapt to his feet with a cry. “The sun!” he shouted, and then, in a lower voice, “what an omen for us, little one—what an omen! Out of the sea, out of our sea! Come, get up, and let’s watch the morning in! There won’t be a trace of mist left, or dew either, in an hour or so.”

He gave her his hand and hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “Quick!” he cried. “You can see it across the sea from over there. I’ve often seen it, but never like this, never with you!”

Hand in hand they left the shade of the trees and hastening up the slope of a little grassy mound—perhaps the grave of some viking-ancestor of his own—they stood side by side surveying the wonder of the sunrise.

As they stood there and the sun, mounting rapidly higher and higher, dispersed the mists and flooded everything with golden light, Brand’s mood began to change towards his companion. The situation was reversed now and it was his arms that twined themselves round the girl’s figure, while she, though only resisting gently and tenderly, seemed to have recovered the normal instincts of her sex, the instincts of self-protection and aloofness.

The warmer the sun became and the more clearly the familiar landscape defined itself before them, the more swiftly did the relations between the two change and reverse. No longer did Brand feel as though some mystic spiritual union had annihilated the difference between their sex. The girl was once more an evasive object of pursuit. He desired her and his desire irritated and angered him.

“We shan’t have the place to ourselves much longer,” he said. “Come—let’s say good-bye where we were before—where we weren’t so much in sight.”

He sought to lead her back to the shade of the cedars; but she—looking timidly at his face—felt for the first time a vague reaction against him and an indefinable shrinking.

“I think I’ll say good-bye to you here,” she said, with a faint smile. “Nance will be looking for me everywhere and I mustn’t frighten her any further.”

She was astonished and alarmed at the change in his face produced by her words.

“As you please,” he said harshly, “here, as well as anywhere else, if that’s your line! You’d better go back the way you came, but the gates aren’t locked if you prefer the avenue.” He actually left her when he said this, and without touching her hand or giving her another look, strode down the slope and away towards the house.

This was more than Linda could bear. She ran after him and caught him by the arm. “Brand,” she whispered, “Brand, my dearest one, you’re not really angry with me, are you? Of course, I’ll say good-bye wherever you wish! Only—only—” and she gave an agitated little sigh, “I don’t want to frighten Nance more than I can help.”

He led her back to the spot where, under the dark wide-spreading branches, the red finger of the sun had first touched them. She loved him too well to resist long, and she loved him too well not to taste, in the passionate tears that followed her abandonment to his will, a wild desperate sweetness, even in the midst of all her troubled apprehensions as to the calamitous issues of their love.

It was in the same place, finally, and under the same dark branches, that they bade one another good-bye. Brand looked at his watch before they parted and they both smiled when he announced that it was nearly six, and that at any moment the milk-cart might pass them coming up from the village. As he moved away, Linda saw him stoop and pick up something from the ground. He turned with a laugh and flung the thing towards her so that it rolled to her feet. It was a fir-cone and she knew well why he threw it to her as their farewell signal. They had wondered, only a little while ago, how it drifted beneath their cedar-tree, and Brand had amused himself by twining it in her hair.

She picked it up. The hair was twisted about it still—of a colour not dissimilar from the cone, but of a lighter shade. She slipped the thing into her dress and let it slide down between her breasts. It scratched and pricked her as soon as she began to walk, but this discomfort gave her a singular satisfaction. She felt like a nun, wearing for the first time her symbol of separation from the world—of dedication to her lord’s service. “I am certainly no nun now,” she thought, smiling sadly to herself, “but I am dedicated—dedicated forever and a day. Oh, my dear, dear Love, I would willingly die to give you pleasure!”

She moved away, down the avenue towards the village. She had not gone very far when she was startled by a rustle in the undergrowth and the sound of a mocking laugh. She stopped in terror. The laugh was repeated, and a moment later, from a well-chosen hiding-place in a thicket of hazel-bushes, Philippa Renshaw, with malignant shining eyes, rushed out upon her.

“Ah!” she cried joyously, “I thought it was you. I thought it was one or other of you! And where is our dear Brand? Has he deserted you so quickly? Does he prefer to have his little pleasures before the sun is quite so high? Does he leave her to go back all alone and by herself? Does he sneak off like a thief as soon as daylight begins?”

Linda was too panic-stricken to make any reply to this torrent of taunts. With drawn white face and wide-open terrified eyes, she stared at Philippa as a bird might stare at a snake. Philippa seemed delighted with the effect she produced and stepping in front of the young girl, barred her way of escape.

“You mustn’t leave us now,” she cried. “It’s impossible. It would never do. What will they say in the village when they see you like that, crossing the green, at this hour? What you have to do, Linda Herrick, is to come back and have breakfast with us up at the house. My mother will be delighted to see you. She always gets up early, and she’s very, very fond of you, as you know. You do know my mother’s fond of you, don’t you?

“Listen, you silly white-faced thing! Listen, you young innocent, who must needs come wandering round people’s houses in the middle of the night! Listen—you Linda Herrick! I don’t know whether you’re stupid enough to imagine that Brand’s going to marry you? Are you stupid enough for that? Are you, you dumb staring thing? Because, if you are, I can tell you a little about Brand that may surprise you. Perhaps you think you’re the first one he’s ever made love to in this precious park of ours. No, no, my beauty, you’re not the first—and you won’t be the last. We Renshaws are a curious family, as you’ll find out, you baby, before you’ve done with us. And Brand’s the most curious of us all!

“Well, are you coming back with me? Are you coming back to have a nice pleasant breakfast with my mother? You’d better come, Linda Herrick, you’d better come! In fact, you are coming, so that ends it. People who spend the night wandering about other people’s grounds must at least have the decency to show themselves and acknowledge the hospitality! Besides, how glad Brand will be to see you again! Can’t you imagine how glad he’ll be? Can’t you see his look?

“Oh, no, Linda Herrick, I can’t possibly let you go like this. You see, I’m just like my dear mother. I love gentle, sensitive, pure-minded young girls. I love their shyness and their bashfulness. I love the unfortunate little accidents that lead them into parks and gardens. Come, you dumb big-eyed thing! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you speak? Come! Back with you to the house! We’ll find my mother stirring—and Brand too, unless he’s sick of girls’ society and has gone off to Mundham. Come, white-face; there’s nothing else for it. You must do what I tell you.”

She laid her hand on Linda’s shoulder, and, such was the terror she excited, the unhappy girl might actually have been magnetized into obeying her, if a timely and unexpected interruption had not changed the entire situation. This was the appearance upon the scene of Adrian Sorio. Sorio had recently acquired an almost daily habit of strolling a little way up the Oakguard avenue before his breakfast with Baltazar. On two or three of these occasions he had met Philippa, and he had always sufficient hope of meeting her to give these walks a tang of delicate excitement. He had evidently heard nothing of Linda’s disappearance. Nance in her distress had, it seemed, resisted the instinct to appeal to him. He was consequently considerably surprised to see the two girls standing together in the middle of the sunlit path.

Linda, flinging Philippa aside, rushed to meet him. “Adrian! Adrian!” she cried piteously, “take me home to Nance.” She clung to his arm and in the misery of her outraged feelings, began sobbing like a child who has been lost in the dark. Sorio, soothing and petting her as well as he could, looked enquiringly at Philippa as she came up.

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Adrian. It’s only that I wanted her to come up to the house. She seems to have misunderstood me and got silly and frightened. She’s not a very sensible little girl.”

Sorio looked at Philippa searchingly. In his heart he suspected her of every possible perversity and maliciousness. He realized at that moment how entirely his attraction to her was an attraction to what is dangerous and furtive. He did not even respect her intelligence. He had caught her more than once playing up to his ideas in a manner that indicated a secret contempt for them. At those moments he had hated her, and—with her—had hated, as he fancied, the whole feminine tribe—that tribe which refuses to be impressed even by world-crushing logic. But how attractive she was to him! How attractive, even at this moment, as he looked into her defiant, inscrutable eyes, and at her scornfully curved lips!

“You needn’t pity her, Adrian,” she went on, casting a bitter smile at Linda’s bowed head as the young girl hid her face against his shoulder. “There’s no need to pity her. She’s just like all the rest of us, only she doesn’t play the game frankly and honestly as I do. Send her home to her sister, as she says, and come with me across the park. I’ll show you that oak tree if you’ll come—the one I told you about, the one that’s haunted.”

She threw at him a long deep look, full of a subtle challenge, and stretched out her hand as if to separate him from the clinging child. Sorio returned her look and a mute struggle took place between them. Then his face hardened.

“I must go back with her,” he said. “I must take her to Nance.”

“Nonsense!” she rejoined, her eyes darkening and changing in colour. “Nonsense, my dear! She’ll find her way all right. Come! I really want you. Yes, I mean what I say, Adrian. I really want you this time!”

The expression with which she challenged him now would have delighted the great antique painters of the feminine mystery. The gates of her soul seemed to open inwards, on magical softly-moving hinges, and an incalculable power of voluptuous witchcraft emanated from her whole body.

It is doubtful whether a spell so provocative could have been resisted by any one of an origin different from Sorio’s. But he had in him—capable of being roused at moments—the blood of that race in which of all others women have met their match. To this witchcraft of the north he opposed the marble-like disdain of the south—the disdain which has subtlety and knowledge in it—the disdain which is like petrified hatred.

His face darkened and hardened until it resembled a mask of bronze.

“Good-bye,” he said, “for the present. We shall meet again—perhaps to-morrow. But anyway, good-bye! Come, Linda, my child.”

“Perhaps to-morrow—and perhaps not!” returned Philippa bitterly. “Good-bye, Linda. I’ll give your love to Brand!”

Sorio said little to his companion as he escorted her back to her lodging in the High Street. He asked her no questions and seemed to take it as quite a natural thing that she should have been out at that early hour. They discovered Dr. Raughty in the house when they arrived, doing his best to dissuade Nance from any further desperate hunt after the wanderer, and it was in accordance with the doctor’s advice, as well as their own weariness that the two sisters spent the later morning hours of their August Bank-holiday in a profound and exhausted sleep.