“You mean,” answered Joan quietly, “that if I had let your mother die and had married your father, that he and I would have loved each other to the end; that I should have helped him and encouraged him in all things, so that his success would have been certain. Is that the argument?” Joan shot a glance from over her cup. The poor puzzled face was staring into the fire. Joan could almost hear him saying it.!

“The Cyril Baptiste,” he answered, in a low, even, passionate voice, that he flung at her almost like a blow. “The atheist, the gaol bird, the pariah, the blasphemer, the anti-Christ. I’ve hoofs instead of feet. Shall I take off my boots and show them to you? I tuck my tail inside my coat. You can’t see my horns. I’ve cut them off close to my head. That’s why I wear my hair long: to hide the stumps.” She placed the ring on her finger and held out her hand. “I might have been measured for it,” she said. “I wonder how he knew.”

He sketched out their plans to her. It seemed to be all going in at one ear and out at the other. What was the matter with her? Perhaps she was tired without knowing it. She would get him to tell her all about it to-morrow. Also, to-morrow, she would tell him about Phillips, and ask his advice. It was really quite late. If he talked any more now, it would give her a headache. She felt it coming on. “Why did we all like him?” asked Joan. “Even Miss Lavery. There’s nothing extraordinary about him.” Her room was always kept ready for her. Often she would lie there, watching the moonlight creep across the floor; and a curious feeling would come to her of being something wandering, incomplete. She would see as through a mist the passionate, restless child with the rebellious eyes to whom the room had once belonged; and later the strangely self-possessed girl with that impalpable veil of mystery around her who would stand with folded hands, there by the window, seeming always to be listening. And she, too, had passed away. The tears would come into her eyes, and she would stretch out yearning arms towards their shadowy forms. But they would only turn upon her eyes that saw not, and would fade away.