She got down very dubiously from the brougham, from which Stella had sprung like an arrow. And Andrews, who drove the warm little carriage which was Stella’s, as he was more or less Stella’s man, turned immediately and drove away, no doubt to relieve the gatekeeper, who was waiting to close up after him. A sleepy footman had opened the door, and stood waiting while Katherine, in her white cloak, lingered in the porch. The fire was still burning in the hall, and the lamp bright. Katherine told the man to go to bed, and that she would herself fasten the door, and then she turned to the glory of the night, and the lawn, and all the shrubberies, looking like frosted silver in the moonlight. Stella had disappeared somewhere among the shadows with her lover. Katherine heard a faint sound of steps, and thought she could perceive still a gleam of whiteness among the trees. She stepped out herself upon the walk. It sounded a little crisp under her foot, for there was frost in the air. The moon was glorious, filling earth and heaven with light, and flinging the blackest shadows into all the corners. And the stillness was such that the dropping of one of those last yellow leaves slowly down through the air was like an event. She was warmly wrapped up in her fur cloak, and, though the hour was eerie, the night was beautiful, and the house with its open door, and the glow of the red fire, and the light of the lamp, gave protection and fellowship. All the rare trees, though sufficiently hardy to bear it, had shrunk a little before that pennyworth of frost, though it was really nothing, not enough to bind the moisture in a little hollow of the path, which Katherine had to avoid as she walked up and down in her satin shoes. After a while she heard the little click of the door at the foot of the steep path which led to the beach, and concluded that Stella had let her lover out that way, and would soon join her. But Katherine was in no hurry; she was not cold, and she had never been out, she thought, in so lovely a night. It carried her away to many thoughts; I will not venture to allege that James Stanford was not one of them. It would have been strange if she had not thought of him in these circumstances. She had never had the chance of saying farewell to him; he had been quenched at once by her father, and he had not had the spirit to come back, which, she supposed, Sir Charles had. He had disappeared and made no sign. Stella was more lucky than she was in every way. Poor Stella! who must just have gone through one of the most terrible of separations! “Partings that press the life from out young hearts!” Who was it that said that? But still it must be better to have the parting than that he should disappear like a shadow without a word, and be no more seen or heard of--as if he were dead. And perhaps he was dead, for anything she knew.