“We are not in sunshine now,” she said; “only in star-shine, and losing our heads a little. I am going to marry Mr. Calladine, you know, Lovel. So perhaps I should not talk about him to you as I have been talking, or ... or indulge myself in these fancies. You asked me what I had told him about yourself and me; I answered that there was nothing to tell; nor is there.” “But if I had not gone into the beech-clump ...” began Lovel. He was suddenly Puckish, mischievous; or so she thought. “But you did go into it!” she cried out. “And stayed in it till you were out of sight. But Calladine,” he resumed, disregarding her effort to restore the balance of their conversation, “Calladine will get you into a room for the rest of your life. It will be a dim room, with the light shrouded from it. He will talk in it, and you will listen, and his talk will seem to you less and less unconvincing. Presently you will accept it as natural talk; you will answer in the same key. You will play sad old tunes, and Calladine will lean over the piano. But he will grow less graceful and more ungainly, and his joints will crack when he stoops over your hand to kiss it. And always you will be in the house,--in the room.” “Lovel!” she cried. “The dimness of the room will bleach your spirit,” he said finally and remorselessly. What strange mood possessed him? Were the legends true? had he the gift of prophecy? His very language had a sonorous, almost a Biblical, ring. It was true that the occasion fostered it, and that he might be taken for a prophet, standing there on the elevation, ringed with darkness, and with that pool of dying fire at his feet. “Is it kind, Lovel, is it kind to put these thoughts into my head?” she cried, distressed. “Kind,” he said scornfully. “When did ever you want kindness from me? I haven’t given you kindness, or romance like Calladine’s. I keep kindness for Olver.” “And for animals,” she interjected, remembering. The remembrance softened her marvellously towards him. “And for animals. But for you....” He scanned her from head to foot, as though the term for what he had given her were inexpressible. “Not kindness for you,” he finished up. A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men closed round it and hid it from view. “Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t sacrifice them on the stones,--not they. They’ll all be chivvied back into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. See, now, they are beating out the fire.” The last sparks flew large and red in the darkness.