Sophie, only too willing to be convinced, sat by him in the little clearing, and listened almost in silence. Behind them on both sides the hazel-bushes made a faintly whispering screen of darkness, at their feet the mill-dam lay silent save for the occasional plop-plop of the tiny trout rising at late flies, on the further bank the hedge was a network of tangled black against the deepening sky, while overhead the elms and sycamores were pierced by the first faint stars. The two were set in a hushed sphere of aloofness, and for Sophie it was the world. "Trust me, my sweet Sophie--only trust me!" was whispered in her ear, and when she answered that she did, and he told her that if it were really so she would not draw away from him, she let his arms creep round her and his mouth come to hers. Weeks of carefully calculated love making had gone to make her pliable, kisses at which all the chill girlhood of her would earlier have shuddered, as it had at the same thing in Charles Le Petyt, she now bore, if not yet with passion, yet with the woman's tolerance of it in the man she loves. Crandon knew it was the moment to bind her to him irrevocably, for he guessed that to a woman of her type faithfulness is a necessity of self-respect, and with him desire was one with deliberate planning. Whether he threw a spell of words over her, or whether the mere force of his thought pleaded with her to prove she trusted him utterly, Sophie could never have told. She only knew that the still night, the soft air, the rustling leaves and the pricking stars, his presence, dimly seen but deeply felt, and the beating in her own frame, all cried to her, "It was for this that I was born! For this, for this, for this!" IV THE SPELL Every one, on looking back at the past, even from the near standpoint of a few months, realizes how it falls into separate phases, unnoticed at the time, but nevertheless distinct. When she had reached her apex, Sophie saw how that night by the mill-dam had shut down one phase for ever, and ushered in a new one. Deceptions, and constant evading of her father's suspicions, secret meetings, to connive at which it became a bitter necessity to bribe the servants, hard Lylie and slow-tongued James--while at the same time instinct warned her to keep the thing from Hester Keast--all these were wearisome and galling, but by the quality of affairs with Crandon fell into insignificance, merely an added irritation, flies on a wound.