How full of happy fancies the young man’s mind was as they drove through the lanes and cross-country roads to Hawksyard under that brilliant sky, so peopled with worlds of light—‘gods, or the abodes of gods;’ he cared to-night no more than Sardanapalus what those stars might be—with now a view of distant hills, far away towards the famous Wrekin, a cloudlike spot in the extreme distance, and now vivid gleams of the nearer river, glittering under those glittering stars. ‘Isn’t it a delicious night, mother?’ he cried, and only a gentle snore—a snore expressive of the blissfulness of repose after exertion—breathed from the matronly mass of furred cloak and hood. He was quite alone—glad to be alone—alone with his new sense of happiness, and the starry night, and the image of his dear love. She had spoken him fair; she meant to make him happier than man ever was upon earth, since the earth could have produced but one Daphne. She must have meant something by those delicious words, that sweet spontaneous praise. Unsolicited she had taken his hand and pressed it with affectionate warmth—she who had been so cold to him—she who had never evinced one touch of tender feeling before; only a frank, sisterly kindness, which was more galling than cruelty. And to-night she had lifted up her eyes and looked at him—eyes so mournfully sweet, so exquisitely beautiful. ‘My angel, that marble heart is melted at last,’ he said to himself. ‘Who would not be constant, for such a reward?’ He had only been in love with Daphne a little over six months, yet it seemed to him now that in that half year lay the drama of his life. All that went before had been only prologue. True that he had fancied himself in love with Madoline—the lovely and gracious lady of his youthful dreams—but this was but the false light that comes before the dawn. He felt some touch of shame at having been so deceived as to his own feelings. He remembered that afternoon in the meadows between South Hill and Arden Rectory, when he had poured his woes into Daphne’s sympathising ears; when she, his idol of to-night, his idol for evermore, had seemed to him only a pretty school-girl in a muslin frock. Was she the same Daphne? Was he the same Edgar? She who now was a goddess in his sight. He who wondered that he could ever have cared for any other woman. The disciple of Condillac, when he sits himself down seriously to think out the question whether the rose which he touches and smells is really an independent existence, or only exists in relation to his own senses, was never in a more bewildered condition than honest Edgar Turchill when he remembered how devotedly, despairingly, undyingly, he had once loved—or fancied that he loved—Madoline.