As before, we spent the evening at the piano, and I sang this song to her almost under my breath: “I would, alas! it were not so For ever and for ever.” I could see that the tears were raining down her cheeks as she listened. She held a fan so as to conceal her face from the others in the room. “We shall see each other again soon,” I murmured, as I said good-night. Lord Gascoyne and I were the last to leave the smoking-room, and he parted from me at the foot of the stairs that led to the bachelors’ quarters. My bedroom was half-way down a long corridor, at the end of which there was a solid door, which gave on to the battlements. It was bolted inside, but not locked, and I had more than once used it to take an evening stroll when the inhabitants of Hammerton Castle were asleep. This evening I opened the door noiselessly and walked out on to the walls. It was a clear starlight night and bitterly cold. I did not mind this, for I had on a thick fur coat. I strolled along, thinking deeply, when suddenly I was brought to a standstill by a ray of light that fell right across my path. I looked in the direction from whence it came, and was astonished to see Esther Lane leaning out of a window a few feet from me. The terrace at this point took an abrupt turn, and a comparatively new part of the castle had been built out at a tangent. She had not noticed my approach, for I wore house-shoes, which made no noise. She was looking at the stars as if their ceaseless splendour might be symbolic of an inevitable dawn of happiness somewhere. They could not have been completely reassuring, for she was weeping, and as I stood and watched, a convulsive sob broke from her. The picture of the forlorn little dependent, a frail white figure in the patch of light, with the gloomy towers and battlements of Hammerton looming round her, affected me strangely. I leant forward over the low wall and murmured her name. “Esther!” She started and looked round, drawing back quickly as she saw me clearly defined in the moonlight. “You must not cry. It breaks my heart.” At the moment I fully believed what I said. Her eyes, full of tears, were turned upon me, and, with a strange look of fear, which haunts me to this hour, she said: “I thought I should never see you again.” “You were going away?” She saw that she had betrayed her intention, and tried to excuse herself. “It will be better.” “Why? If you go away I shall never come here again.” I was upon the low wall, the ground full sixty feet below me. “Oh, go back! you will fall.” But I had my hand on her window-sill and one foot on a ledge a short distance below it, whilst the other remained on the wall. She was helpless; to have attempted to stay me would have been to send me in all probability to certain death. She clasped her hands and held her breath. The next moment I was in the room and by her side. “Don’t be afraid; only I must speak to you. We must understand each other.” “Oh, go away, please.”