But at last the scene changed, and abruptly. She was on the mountain above the fog-ocean, close to the stars. Thorpe's arms were strong about her. It had seemed to her in the past five months that she had never really ceased to feel the strength of his embrace, to hear the loud beating of his heart on her own. This time he withdrew one arm and, thrusting his fingers among her heartstrings, pulled them gently. Something vibrated throughout her. She had been happy before, but that soft vibration filled her with a new and inexplicable gladness. She asked him what it meant. He murmured something she could not understand, and smote the chords again. Her being seemed filled with music. She awoke. The woods were dark. She tried to recall the ugly prelude to her dream, but it had passed. She put her hands against her shoulders, fancying she must encounter the arms that had held her, for their pressure lingered. Then she drew her brows together, and craned her neck with an expression of wonder. But several moments passed before she understood. She was very ignorant of many things, and her experience up to the present had been exceptional. But she was a woman, and in time she understood. Her first mental response was a wild unreasoning terror, that of the woman who is in sore straits, far from the man who should protect her and evoke the hasty sanction of the law. But the mood passed. She was sure of Thorpe, and she had all the arrogance of wealth. He would hasten at her summons, and they would live in this solitude for a year or more; no one beyond the necessary confidants need ever know. The maternal instinct had awakened in her dream. She folded herself suddenly in her own arms. Her imagination flew to the future. Every imaginative woman who loves the man that becomes her husband must have one enduring regret: that in a third or more of his life she had no part; he grew to manhood knowing nothing of her little share in the scheme of things, met her when two at least of his personalities were coffined in the yesterday that is the most vivid of all the memories. And if his child be a boy, she may fancy it the incarnation of her husband's lost boyhood and youth, and thus complete the circle of her manifold desire. And then Nina knew what had scotched the monster of heredity; she could see the tiny hands at its throat. She lay and marvelled until the servants, alarmed, came to look for her. The world took on a new and wonderful aspect; she was the most wonderful thing in it. IV After supper she went into the sitting-room and wrote to Thorpe. As she finished and left the desk, her eye fell on Richard Clough's letter, which lay, open, on the table. The same chill horror caught her as when she had encountered his searching eyes on the last day of his visit, and she understood its meaning. He knew; there was the key to his verbiage.