There were three or four other loungers upon the terrace, each with his cigar, the luminous point of which gleamed here and there among the bushes like a glowworm. There was no reason why Daphne should distinguish Gerald Goring from the rest, as he sat in an angle of the stone balustrade, half hidden in the shadow of an acacia, lonely, dissatisfied; yet it was painful to him, in his egotism, to see her standing there, immovable, a lovely statuesque form, with upturned face and clasped hands, worshipping the blind, dumb, unresponsive goddess Nature, and all unconscious that he, her lover, with a human heart to feel and to suffer, was looking up at her with passionate yearning from the dewy darkness below. ‘She does not care a jot for me; she is harder than the nether millstone,’ he said to himself savagely. ‘Yet I once thought her the softest, most yielding thing in creation—a being so impressionable that she might be moulded by a thought of mine. I feared the touching of our spirits, as if I were flame and she tinder. Yet our souls have touched, and kindled, and burst into a blaze; and she has strength of mind to pluck herself away unscathed, not a feather of her purity scorched, from that fiery contact.’ He sat in his shadowy corner, lazily finishing his cigar, and looking up at the figure in the balcony till it slowly melted from his gaze, and a muslin curtain was dropped across the open window. Then he left the garden and wandered away up the wooded hillside, by narrow winding paths, which seemed to have no particular direction, but to have been worn by the footprints of other idlers as purposeless—it might be as unhappy—as he. He stayed in the shadowy wood for a long time, smoking a second cigar, and preferring that perfumed solitude, and his own gloomy thoughts to any diversion which the little lighted town down in the green hollow yonder could have furnished him. And then, at last, on the verge of midnight, when all the lighted windows of the Jungfraublich had gone out one after another, and the big white barrack looked blank and bare, he turned and groped his way back to it through the sinuous woodland paths, and was admitted by a sleepy porter, who was mildly reproachful at having been kept up so long. A grand excursion had been planned for the next day, Sir Vernon approving the scheme, and politely requesting to be left out of it. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with me,’ he said. ‘I should be a burden to you, and I should be terribly tiresome to myself. I have letters to write which will occupy me all the morning, and in the afternoon I can stroll down to the Kursaal, or sit in the garden here, or take a little walk in the wood. You will be back before nine o’clock, I daresay.’ Madoline was loth to leave her father for so long a day. He was an invalid, and required a good deal of attention, she reminded him.