A moment--one tremulous, heart-shaking moment--and then her form bent to me, abandoned, conquered; her face looked up, then sank upon my breast; but before it sank I read upon it a tenderness and a passion infinite, and caught in her eyes the perfect light of love. As the glory of delight came flooding on my soul, the sun's disc dropped, and the first cold shadow of night fell upon earth. The blackbird uttered a broken "Amen," and was gone no man knew whither. The golden ripple passed up the river, and vanished in a leaden grey. One low shuddering sigh swept through the trees, then all was dumb. I looked westward. Towards the horizon the blue of day was fading downwards through indistinguishable zones of purple, amethyst, and palest rose, the whole heaven arching in one perfect rainbow of love. But while I looked and listened to the beating of that beloved heart girdled with my arm, there grew a something on the western sky that well-nigh turned my own heart to marble. At first, a lightest shadow--a mere breath upon heaven's mirror, no more. Then as I gazed, it deepened, gathering all shadows from around the pole, heaping, massing, wreathing them around one spot in the troubled west--a shape that grew and threatened and still grew, until I looked on--what? Up from the calm sea of air rose one solitary island, black and looming, rose and took shape and stood out--the very form and semblance of Dead Man's Rock! Sable and real as death it towered there against the pale evening, until its shadow, falling on my heart itself and on the soft brown head that bent and nestled there, lay round us clasped so, and with its frown cursed the morning of our love. Something in my heart's beat, or in the stiffening of my arm, must have startled my darling, for as I gazed I felt her stir, and, looking down, caught her eyes turned wistfully upwards. My lips bent to hers. "Mine, Claire! Mine for ever!" And there, beneath the shadow of the Rock, our lips drew closer, met, and were locked in their first kiss. When I looked up again the shadow had vanished, and the west was grey and clear. So in the tranquil evening we rowed homewards, our hearts too full for speech. The wan moon rose and trod the waters, but we had no thoughts, no eyes for her. Our eyes were looking into each other's depths, our thoughts no thoughts at all, but rather a dazzled and wondering awe. Only as a light or two gleamed out, and Streatley twinkled in the distance, Claire said-- "Can it be true? You know nothing of me." "I know you love me. What more should I know, or wish to know?" The red lips were pursed in a manner that spoke whole tomes of wisdom. "You do not know that I work for my living all the week?" "When you are mine you shall work no more." "'But sit on a cushion and sew a gold seam'? Ah, no; I have to work. It is strange," she said, musingly, "so strange." "What is strange, Claire?"