“Look there!” she said, wildly, turning sharply round to Rivers, who was standing behind her. “Look! I see myself there!” She was so wrought up that she felt and showed no surprise at his presence. It was so picturesquely natural that she should be standing there in the moonlight, on the bank of the most romantic river in the whole world, with the only man she had ever loved. Time and chance had combined to bring about this hour. Rivers had never thought of following her before. But he completely ignored her morbid speech. She was hurt, though, indeed, it was what she might have expected. She said no more, but stood looking tragically down into the flood. “By Jove, but it is fine!” the artist presently murmured to himself, in tones of deep conviction. Nature--mere non-sentient, abstract Nature again--and a woman, eager, passionate and romantic, standing by him! “Don’t you wish you had your sketch book here?” that woman asked him, bitterly. “Oh, I can remember it!” he replied, simply. “But I am very glad I came out. How did you happen to know there was a moon, and that she would be shining over this reach of the river?” “I didn’t know,” she said. “I just came out--I don’t know why--I suppose, because I was restless.” She sighed, and fingered her sash, and sighed again. “How did you know where I had gone? I have been”--reproachfully--“an hour away, and you never even looked up when I left the room!” “I missed you, though,” he said. “I feel things, sometimes, when I am very busy, without seeing them.” “Perhaps, then, it occurred to you that I might have got into mischief,” she went on lightly. “You didn’t know that I come here nearly every night?” “Why not?” “And yet this is the first time you have followed me!” she said, regretfully. “Yes, I come here, night after night, and I look down into this pool, and I imagine myself lying in it with my face turned up to the moon, drowned and dead, and at an end of all my troubles, and you hearing of it, and being a little--a very little--sorry for me!” “But you are surely not thinking of committing suicide, are you?” he asked her, quite calmly, “for, really, no one would have the slightest excuse for falling in off this miniature beach?” She made a gesture of impatience--then she laughed, in tragic impotence. “One can drown oneself in a teacup, if one has a mind. But I think I will go up the bank, now, and put myself out of the reach of temptation.” “Do you want to go indoors? If not, let us walk a little way to the Junction, if you don’t mind? I want to see the Greta meet the Tees under this strong moonlight. It must be magnificent. It is a shame to stay in the house when the moon is out like this. Browning speaks of her ‘unhandsome thrift of silver.’ There’s plenty of her now, isn’t there? Glorious! It is a night of nights!” Mrs. Elles agreed with him--but from a different point of view.