They breakfasted _tête-à-tête_ in their bower of roses; they wandered about the Chase or sat in the garden all day long. They led an idle desultory life like little children, and wondered that evening came so soon, and stayed up late into the summer night, steeping themselves in the starshine and silence which seemed new to them in their mutual delight. There was a lovely view from that broad terrace, with its Italian balustrade and statues, its triple flight of marble steps descending to an Italian garden, which had been laid out in the Augustan age of Pope and Addison, when the distinctive feature of a great man’s garden was stateliness. Here was the lovers’ favourite loitering place when the night grew late, Juanita looking like Juliet in her loose white silk tea-gown, with its Venetian amplitude of sleeve and its mediæval gold embroidery. The fashionable dressmaker who made that gown had known how to adapt her art to Miss Dalbrook’s beauty. The long straight folds accentuated every line of the finely moulded figure, fuller than the average girlish figure, suggestive of Juno rather than Psyche. She was two inches taller than the average girl, and looked almost as tall as her lover as she stood beside him in the moonlight, gazing dreamily at the landscape. This hushed and solemn hour on the verge of midnight was their favourite time. Then only were they really alone, secure in the knowledge that all the household was sleeping, and that they had their world verily to themselves, and might be as foolish as they liked. Once, at sight of a shooting star, Juanita flung herself upon her lover’s breast and sobbed aloud. It was some minutes before he could soothe her. “My love, my love, what does it mean?” he asked, perplexed by her agitation. “I saw the star, and I prayed that we might never be parted; and then it flashed upon me that we _might_, and I could not bear the thought,” she sobbed, clinging to him like a frightened child. “My dear one, what should part us, except death?” “Ah, Godfrey, death is everywhere. How could a good God make His creatures so fond of each other and yet part them so cruelly as He does sometimes?” “Only to unite them again in another world, Nita. I feel as if our two lives must go on in an endless chain, circling among those stars yonder, which could not have been made to be for ever unpeopled. There are happy lovers there at this instant, I am convinced—lovers who have lived before us here, and have been translated to a higher life yonder; lovers who have felt the pangs of parting, the ecstasy of reunion.”