‘Dear love, you promised, you promised me. How could I have lived if I had not thought you would come back?’ Then the tone changed. She was no longer appealing to another, but talking to herself, hurriedly, breathlessly, with ever increasing agitation. ‘Why not to-night? Why shouldn’t he come back to-night? He was always fond of moonlight nights. He promised to be true to me, and stand by me, come what might. No harm should ever come to me. He swore that, swore it with his arms round me, his eyes looking into mine. No man could be false, and yet look as he looked, and speak as he spoke.’ Silence for a brief space, and then a sudden cry—a sharp anguish-stricken cry, as of a broken heart. ‘Who said he was dead and gone, dead and gone years ago? The world wouldn’t look as bright as it does if he were dead. He loved the moonlight. Could you shine, false moon, if he were dead?’ Again a pause, and then a slower, more thoughtful tone, as if doubts disturbed that demented brain. ‘Was it last year he used to come, last year when we were so happy together—last year when——’ A sudden burst of tears interrupted the sentence. The woman’s face fell forward on her folded arms, and the frail body was shaken by her sobs. Maurice Clissold no longer doubted his visitant’s humanity. This was real grief, perchance real madness. For a little while he had fancied it a case of somnambulism. But the eyes which he had seen lifted despairingly to that moonlit sky had too much expression for the eyes of a somnambulist. For a long time—or time that seemed long to Clissold’s mind—the woman knelt by the window, now silent, motionless as an inanimate figure, now talking rapidly to herself, anon invoking that absent one whose broken promises were perhaps the cause of her wandering wits. Never had the young man beheld a more piteous spectacle. It was as if one of Wordsworth’s most pathetic pastorals were here realized. His heart ached at the sound of those heart-broken sighs. This flesh and blood sorrow moved him more deeply than any spectral woe. This was no ghostly revisitant of earth, who acted over agonies dead and gone, but a living, loving woman, who mourned a lost or a faithless lover. At last, with one farewell look seaward, as if it were along yon moonlit track across the waves she watched for the return of her lover, this new Hero turned from the casement, closed it carefully and quietly, and then slowly left the room. Maurice heard that slipshod foot going slowly along the passage, until the sound dwindled and died in the distance. He fancied sleep would have been impossible after such a scene as this, but perhaps that over-strained attention of the last hour had exhausted his wakefulness, for he fell off presently into a sound slumber, from which he was only awakened by a friendly voice outside his door saying, ‘Six o’clock, Mr. Clissold. If you want the long round I promised you last night we ought to start at seven.’