He paused, gazing at her where she stood in the half-light, a misty, uncertain figure. She was curiously happy. The delicious and pangless sense of guilt, however--the guilt of the hidden, not the blameworthy thing--that was tingling through her was for him a shrinking and acute self-reproach. "Here!" he said under his breath. "To have brought myself here, of all places, for you of all women to risk yourself for me! I only know that I was wandering for years and years in a shadowy desert, searching for something that would not be found--and then, suddenly I was here and you were speaking to me! You should have left me to be dragged away where I could trouble no one again." She was silent. "Forgive me," he said, "if you can. I--I can never forgive myself. How can I best go?" For answer she moved to the window, slender and wraith-like. He followed silently. A million vague new impressions were clutching at him; the fragrance in the room was like a hypnotic incense veiling shadowy forms. Lines started from the blank: And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour, And how, after all, old things were best, That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flower Which she used to wear in her breast! As she parted the curtain, a second of bright lightning revealed the landscape, the dark hedges and clustered trees. It blackened, and she drew him back with a hushed word, pointing where a lantern was flashing through the shrubbery. "It is a watchman," she said. "He will be gone presently." Looking at her, where she stood in the dim light, half turned away, one hand against her cheek, there welled through him a wave of that hopeless longing which her kiss had awakened in that epoch moment of the Reverend Henry Sanderson. The clinging white gown, with the filmy lace at its throat, the taper's faint glow glimmering to a numbus in her loosened hair, the sweet intangible suggestions of the room--all these called to him potently, through the lines that raced in his brain. But O, the smell of that jasmin-flower! And O that music! and O the way That voice rang out from the donjon tower-- "God help me!" he whispered, the pent passion of his dreams rushing to utterance. "Why did I ever see your face? I was reckless and careless then. I had damned the decent side of me that now is quivering alive! I have tried to blot your face from my memory. But it is useless. I shall always see it." A rumble of nearer thunder sounded and a tentative dash of rain struck the pane. She was shaken to her depths. She stood in a whirlwind of emotion. She seemed to feel his arms clasping her, his lips on hers, his adjuring words in her ears. The odor of the flowers wreathed them both. The beating of her heart seemed to fill all the silent room. On the lawn just outside the window, low voices were heard through the increasing rain. They passed, and after a moment he softly unlatched the window. "Good-by," he said.