He recalled, with unspeakable pain, her pale distressed face that day of their first meeting at South Hill; the absolute horror in her widely-opened eyes; the deadly coldness of her trembling hand. Why had she called her boat by that ridiculous name: and why had she been so anxious to cancel it? The thought of those things disturbed his peace. She was so lovely, so innocent, so wild, so wilful. ‘My bright spirit of the woods,’ he said to himself, ‘I should like your fate to be happy. And yet—and yet—’ He dared not shape his thought further, but the question was in his mind: ‘Would I like her fate to be far apart from mine?’ Why had she rejected Edgar Turchill, a man so honestly, so obviously devoted to her?—able, one might suppose, to sympathise with all her girlish fancies, to gratify every whim. ‘She ought to like him; she must be made to like him,’ he said to himself, his heart suddenly aglow with virtuous, almost heroical resolve. His heart had thrilled that night in the shadow of the walnut boughs when he heard Daphne’s contemptuous rejection of her lover. He had been guiltily glad. And yet he was ready to do his duty: he was eager to play the mediator, and win the girl for that true-hearted lover. He meant to be loyal. ‘Poor Daphne!’ he sighed. ‘Her cradle was shadowed by a guilty mother’s folly. She had been cheated out of her father’s love. She need have something good in this life to make amends for all she has lost. Edgar would make an admirable husband.’ The _Kelpie_ turned her nose towards home next day; and soon Gerald was dreamily watching the play of sunbeam and shadow on the heathery slopes above the Kyles of Bute, very near Greenock, and the station and the express train that was to carry him home. He turned his back almost reluctantly on the sea life, the unfettered bachelor habits. Though he longed to see Madoline again, almost as fondly as he had longed for her four months ago when he was leaving Bergen, yet there was a curious indefinable pain mingled with the lover’s yearning. An image thrust itself between him and his own true love; a haunting shape was mingled with all his dreams of the future. ‘Pray God she may marry soon, and have children, and get matronly and dull and stupid!’ he said to himself savagely; ‘and then I shall forget the dryad of Fontainebleau.’