She sat for a long time at her open window, breathing the sweet scents of that May night, and feeling better satisfied with the world than she had felt since she had last sat at that window, trying to realize the idea that the man who held her in bondage was dead. At that time all her thoughts had been of the past; but now they were all of the future. The idea of a sincere and far-reaching friendship with a man was very pleasing to her. It took away from her the sense of isolation. She recalled many cases of which she had read of the admirable operation of a true friendship between a man and a woman, and why might it not be possible, after all, for her to help the man of whom she was thinking in some way by which his interests in the world might be appreciably advanced? The thought of this possibility was much more agreeable to her _amour propre_ than any thought of the possibility of his loving her would have been upon this particular night. And all the joy of the silver summer night was about her as she sat there. Her own garden was just beneath her window, and in its borders the groups of old-fashioned spring flowers could be dimly seen through the silver-shot air. From the meadow at the foot of the Downs came the barking of a dog, and the sound was faintly answered from the shepherd’s hut higher up. There was the occasional lowing of one of the herd of Jerseys, only a short time sent out to the grass and not yet used to the change. Every now and again a bat flapped between her face and the sheen of the sky, and gave her the impression of the hand of some ghostly figure making a grasp at something close to her. At rarer intervals a still more spectral thing swooped by, and its passage was followed by the squeal of a rat, and later by a “tu-whit-tu-whoo” of the barn owl. She leant out of the window so that she could see the dark, many-folded cloud spreading itself abroad halfway across the valley through which the Wadron wandered. That cloud represented the trees of Overdean Manor. The Manor House was hidden by the summer boskage of the Park, so that she saw nothing of it--not even a light in one of the windows.