That was all, then, and to-night was the anniversary of her strange disappearance. There are nights when the world is still and you can feel that she is resting. There are other nights when the stillness is as deep, nay, deeper; but it is not the stillness of rest. The silence is throbbing and alive with some sad secret, and the listening earth is straining to catch it. This was such a night. The whitely gleaming grass stretched away until it reached a vague land of moonlit shadows. The waves were almost articulate in their meanings. The leaves of the poplars kept showing their white underside in the moonlight, until the whole trees swung in the night breeze, a grove of sheeted spectres. Anyone watching the scene was at once seized with the idea that something was going to happen, and, like the watchful stars and bending trees, strained every nerve to listen. At last it came, faint and far off, sad but unutterably sweet, a low wail of plaintive music--so low that at first it seemed the mere coinage of an overwrought fancy. Nearer it came, and nearer, now growing into a full wave of sound, now ebbing away--the mere echo of a sigh, but always coming nearer and nearer, until it seemed to pause irresolutely by the gate which divides the master's garden from the monitors' lawn. Was it another fancy, or were there for a moment a crowd of white, eager faces pressed against the window which looks upon that lawn? Fancy assuredly, for the moon now gleamed back blankly from the glass. For a moment a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand passed over the moon, and as it cleared away a deep-drawn sigh attracted the watcher's eyes to the garden gate. The moon was full upon it; you could see it shake if it shook ever so little. In that listening midnight you could almost hear the flowers whispering to each other, but the gate neither creaked nor shook, and yet someone had passed through it, someone with bent head, and slow, tired feet, who sighed and told the beads of her rosary as she passed. The moonlight played strange tricks that night; it seemed to cling to and follow that silent figure, leaving a white track on the dew-laden grass. And now it paused for one moment before that window, through which those tear-dimmed eyes had so often and so longingly turned towards her own loved south, and as she paused the silence broke, the window was dashed open, and three athletic figures, figures of men who feared neither man nor devil, sprang out with shouts of laughter, surrounded that white figure, still so strangely quiet, and demanded--its name! At the open window from which the three had issued were now gathered half a dozen ladies, looking half amused, half frightened. Among them was Beauty, the Head's daughter.