At the end of the lofty silence beneath which she is passing burns an altar fire of evening sunshine; and towards it her feet, still without any conscious direction on her part, slowly carry her. But when the end of the vista is reached, and its verdant glow exchanged for the evening red of the fair pasture outside, the altar fire has moved further away, and is blazing with ruddy promise for to-morrow behind the trees of Rumsey Brake. Will she pursue it even thither? where for fifteen months her steps have never trod, which has been to her a banned place since----? Yet her feet still bear her onwards. In the sloping meadows through which she passes, lambs on that day were butting and bounding; there is neither butt nor bounding in the fleecy adults dully cropping and waddling to-night. There were buttercups--millions of buttercups--that day; to-day there are none! To-day the gate that leads into the Brake is open; on that day it was locked. With a shiver of retrospective passion, she recalls the roughness with which she had rebuffed his offer of help, knowing what a conflagration even so casual a contact must light in them both. After all, it might as well have happened then as later! She is on the very path now that they had paced in their burning pain--that woof of pain whose warp was stinging pleasure. On that day the moor-hens were leading little dainty broods out of the sedge; to-day there is no life at all on the sunset-painted mirror of the pool. Only that hot blaze that has turned it into the semblance of a cup full of the rosy elixir of life! Here is where they paused to listen to the nightingale. Intolerable nightingale! forcing them to hear things forbidden--things that drove them away in terror of him and of each other; drove them away in the vain hope of averting what must happen, what _had_ to happen! _Had_ to happen! Yes, and _did_ happen! A sort of exaltation in what she has hitherto always shuddered from as the memory of a crime, takes possession of her. It _was_ a sin! Under the circumstances it was a sin and a treachery! But she has paid for it. No one can say that she has not paid for it! and oh, if it could only happen again! The memory of her fault and her suffering alike grow faint; while with her whole tingling body and craving soul she feels again the grip of his arms, the thundering beat of his heart against her breast, the scorching insistence of his lips. She will go to the very spot where it happened; will tryst him there in the aching realism of a memory that seems for once to have been given the never-given privilege of saying to the dead past, bound hand and foot in grave-clothes, “Stand forth!”