For on the previous evening, Sally being out musicking and expected home late, Fenwick and Mrs. Nightingale had gone out in the back-garden to enjoy the sweet air of that rare phenomenon--a really fine spring night in England--leaving the Major indoors because of his bronchial tubes. The late seventies shrink from night air, even when one means to be a healthy octogenarian. Also, they go away to bed, secretively, when no one is looking--at least, the Major did in this case. Of course, he was staying the night, as usual. So, in the interim between the Major's good-night and Sally's cab-wheels, this elderly couple of lovers (as they would have worded their own description) had the summer night to themselves. As the Major closed his bedroom window, he saw, before drawing down the blind, that the two were walking slowly up and down the gravel path, talking earnestly. No impression of mature years came to the Major from that gravel path. A well-made, handsome man, with a bush of brown hair and a Raleigh beard, and a graceful woman suggesting her beauty through the clear moonlight--that was the implication of as much as he could see, as he drew the inference a word of soliloquy hinted at, "Not Millais' Huguenot, so far!" But he evidently expected that grouping very soon. Only he was too sleepy to watch for it, and went to bed. Besides, would it have been honourable? "It's no use, Fenwick," she said to him in the garden, "trying to keep off the forbidden subject, so I won't try." "It's not forbidden by me. Nothing could be, that _you_ would like to say." Was that, she thought, only what so many men say every day to so many women, and mean so little by? Or was it more? She could not be sure yet. She glanced at him as they turned at the path-end, and her misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely nothing. For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had never assented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was, longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole. _She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it. "I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you, I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?" "Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back." "Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further, or die out completely?"