It is a hot night, and the tall French windows stand unshuttered and open. Some impulse of timid coquetry urges her to flee from before him: she is ashamed that he should see the plain letters of joy written on her face at his coming: she would fain have yet a few moments of the happiness of expectancy, to whose delights those of reality are but seldom comparable. From the terrace a flight of stone steps leads down, with many a twist, to the mere. In a minute Essie has run lightly down, and is standing by the water's edge. The dahlias are nodding their round drowsy heads, and the sentinel hollyhocks stand up stiff and pompous with their clustered flower-spikes--rulers and law-givers among the flower-people; the little ripples are biting with playful tooth the low sedge-banks, and the tall bulrush forest, whence the coot and the waterhen families sailed out into life in the warm spring weather. To and fro rock the heavy, lazy, water-lily leaves, whose bloom-time is past two months ago. Through her garden, the sky, the high moon walks stately, holding her silver lamp, in whose light all things shine deliciously. Essie stands entranced. It seems to her like the intermediate residence of some happy soul, freed from the world's toil and moil, shrived from sin, emancipated from life, where it should dwell in tempered bliss till that last day when heaven's brighter glories, stronger raptures, should burst upon and clothe it for aye. She strolls along the narrow gravel path, bathing her hands with childish delight in the moonbeams, and then stoops and picks up two or three little stones that the night's sweet alchemy has gifted with a bright short glory not their own. So stooping, she hears a man's quick firm foot running down the garden steps. She raises herself, and goes to meet him with "a moonlight-coloured smile" on her face. "Aren't they lovely?" she asks, holding up her pebbly treasures for him to look at. Not speaking, he takes the little pink palm, stones and all, into his hand, and looks into her face; and then, as if yielding to a temptation that he hates, that he would fain resist, and to which, being over-strong, he must yet succumb, he snatches her to his breast, and kisses her fiercely--eyelids, lips, and neck--with a violence he is himself hardly conscious of. "Stop!" she cries, surprised, half-shocked, pushing him away from her. "What do you mean? You frighten me!" He recollects himself instantly, and releases her. "It _is_ alarming being kissed, especially when you are not used to it," he answers, with a sneer. She looks up at him in blank astonishment. Has he gone mad? Is it the moonlight that has given him that white wrathy look? "Something has happened!" she says, quickly. "What is it? tell me!" "Oh! nothing--a mere bagatelle!" he replies, with a little bitter laugh. "It is only that I have been hearing a pleasant piece of news." "What is it?" "Only that an acquaintance of mine is going to be married!"