And so at length the accustomed quiet settled down on Stoke Rivers. Dinner was over, and the unwelcome daylight fairly flown. Abstinence had gone to sharpen the edge of hunger, and Laurence made his way down the corridor, pulled the curtain towards him, and entered the room of mysterious meetings in a humour to venture much. At the escritoire stood his fairy-lady, and at the sound of the closing door she turned and extended her arms, a world of delicate welcome in her gesture and her face. Then, as he came towards her, she drew back a little, as though penitent of the fervour of her greeting. Her lips moved, but no sound issued from them; and a quick fear went through the young man that, through the action of some malign influence, she had declined upon her former condition and once again become dumb. This raised the spirit of battle in him, and reinforced his resolution to effect her emancipation from the control of whatever opposing power--physical or spiritual--might hold her in its grasp. The more so that, for all her gladness, there was a hint of trouble, a little cloud of distress upon her face, which provoked him to indignation. He hated that--be it what it might--which held her sweet being in thrall. "Agnes, why is this? Why don't you speak to me?" he demanded. Whereat she smiled, as one who loves yet deprecates another's unreasoning heat. "How can I speak," she asked, "until you have first spoken to me?" "But why not? I don't understand," he said. "Nor I," she answered; "only I know that so it is. I cannot explain the why and wherefore of this, or of much besides, to myself. I am to myself at once real and unreal--as an echo, a shadow, the reflection in a mirror, is at once real and unreal." She looked at him seriously, wonderingly, as though trying to take counsel with him against herself. "I see with your eyes, I speak with your voice, I comprehend with your mind when you are present. When you are absent, I become as the echo unevoked by any sound, as the shadow when neither sun or moon look forth to cast it, as the reflection in the mirror when that of which it was the image has moved away. Only my heart remains to me; and it, when you are absent, longs and searches, journeying from place to place, formless, wordless, and blind, sensible only of its own infelicity, while seeking that which alone can bring it ease and light." "My poor love!" Laurence said gently, greatly moved; "my poor love!"