‘And then we went back to the landing-stage, where you always stop, don’t you know, when you go as far as Stratford, and finding you had not come back for your boat, I was almost in despair. But Gerald suggested Shakespeare’s birthplace, and here we are.’ It was Gerald, then, who had found her; it was Gerald whose quick sympathy, prompt to divine her thoughts, had told him where she would be. Her future husband, the man to whom she was bound, had guessed nothing, had no faculty for understanding her fancies, whims, and follies. How wide apart must she and he remain all their lives, though nominally one! They all three went quietly back to the garden, where the sisters were waiting, amused at Daphne’s folly, and thinking it quite the most charming thing in girlhood; for to these vestals Shakespeare was a religion. ‘I am really very sorry to have caused you so much trouble,’ said Daphne, apologising in a general way; ‘but I had no idea my absence would give anyone concern. Perhaps I have been longer than I intended to be.’ ‘It struck ten a quarter of an hour ago,’ said Edgar. ‘That’s really dreadful; I had no idea it was so late.’ Daphne bade the sisters good-bye, apologising humbly for her nocturnal visit. They went to the garden-gate with her, and stood there watching the light slim figure till it vanished in the moonlight, full of interest in her prettiness and her fancies. ‘Is it not a sweet face?’ asked one. ‘And was it not a sweet idea to come and bid good-bye to this house before she went abroad?’ said the other. Daphne and her companions walked down to the landing-stage, talking very little by the way. Edgar and his betrothed side by side, Gerald walking apart with a cigar. Daphne wanted to row, but Edgar insisted on establishing her in the stern, wrapped in a shawl which he found in the boat. He took the sculls, and Gerald reclined in the bows, smoking and looking up at the night sky. It was a lovely night, all the landscape sublimated by that glory of moonbeam and shadow into something better and more beautiful than its daylight simplicity; every little creek and curve of the river a glimpse of fairyland; all things so radiantly and mysteriously lovely that Daphne almost hoped to see the river-god and his attendant nymphs disporting themselves in some reedy shallow. ‘On such a night as this one would expect to see the old Greek gods come back to earth. I can’t help feeling sorry sometimes, like Alfred de Musset, that they are all dead and gone,’ she said, looking with dreamy eyes down the moonlit tide across which the shadows of the willows fell so darkly.