After dinner Gerald stayed behind to smoke a cigarette, and I stayed with him. When we followed the others to the drawing-room, he went to the piano and began to play. Owen sat by the window looking out. He had not once spoken to me since I had left him and Katherine at the top of Slieve Donard; I thought he had even avoided meeting my glance, but I was not sure. Katherine and Miss Dick had each some needlework. Mrs. Carroll was not with us. From my corner of the room I watched Katherine as she worked, her beautiful head bowed in the lamp-light, and secretly, in my soul, I knew Owen was more fitted to be her mate than I. It is true, I did not believe he could love her so intensely, but the love he gave her would be more unselfish. I became lost in gloomy thoughts. I knew they both belonged to a world where I was a stranger, an outcast. In that hour I recognized my moral inferiority to Owen, and suddenly I felt how peaceful and quiet it would be in the thick darkness, with the grass over my head, and everything finished and forgotten. Gerald had begun to play the “Moonlight Sonata,” Chopinizing it, as he did everything, and perhaps this unhappy vision came to me from his music. At all events, it hovered before me in an intensity of sadness beneath which I shut my eyes. I got up by-and-by and crossed the room to where Katherine sat at her work. I pulled forward a chair and sat down near to her, and with my back to the others, so that what I said should be heard by her alone. “Will you come out with me?” I asked, in a low voice. “Out? _Now_, do you mean?” She looked up in surprise, but she also spoke in lowered tones, and with, I thought, a certain coldness. At this my anger was stirred afresh. “Now,” I answered. She seemed on the point of refusing. “Are you afraid?” I sneered. She appeared not to understand me. “Afraid! What is there to be afraid of?” After a moment she decided. “I will come in a minute or two; I want to finish this flower.” She returned perfectly calmly to her work. She was embroidering a table-cloth for her mother’s birthday, and was always saying she should never have it finished in time. I, with a burning heart, got up and strolled out on to the terrace, my hands in my pockets, and whistling below my breath, which I imagined lent an air of off-handedness to my exit. Once beyond the windows, however, my whistling ceased abruptly, and I hurried round to the other side of the house, where I waited in a fever till she should come. She did not keep me long. She had not put on a hat, nor even a loose wrap about her shoulders; evidently she intended our interview to be a short one. I hastened from the shadow to meet her. “Do you know what I want?” I began gloomily. “You want to speak to me about something, I suppose?” Again I was conscious of a coldness in her voice. “Yes. I have so few opportunities now.” “I think you have plenty of opportunities, considering you see me every day.”