The sweet, hot air of the day, cooling, was turned to dew outside; something of the same kind seemed taking place within herself--and the dew was tears. Why had she been so curiously uplifted that day, so at rest concerning every point in life, so sure of one thing at least? Nothing was changed, yet she saw no reason now for blessing this summer, golden hour for hour, and looking to it for the greatest, serenest happiness. Damon? What was Damon to her, or she to Damon? He had never in so many words made love to her, and she had never felt the first pang of wonder or disappointment at this. They had walked, rowed, ridden together. What of it? They should do these things again a hundred times, probably. What of that? What had she been dreaming, erewhile? Or was this the dream, this bad one? Something splendid and shining and purple had gone gray. While continuing mechanically to play, she looked through the open window into the summer night. It was rightfully her moon, that honeyed bright moon outside; her balm-breathing night; it was her silver sea yonder out of sight; they were her odorous pine-needle paths in the sighing grove--and she was robbed of them. And the sense of it gave her a seething in the heart, the like of which sensation she had never dreamed existed: as if a painful separation of all the atoms in it one from the other, as well as the stern conviction of being--oh, the novel idea!--a fool. "I won't have it!" she muttered, emphatically, without knowing definitely what she meant, and struck an angry discord. Through her playing reached her suddenly that merry harness-jingle of the afternoon, approaching, passing, fading away. "There they go--to the beach for the second time to-day--to look at the ocean by light of the moon." When in little less than an hour she heard the breaking again, on the quiet air, of the fatuous silvery jingle, she let her playing fall to a mere musical murmur, and listened, acutely, burning all the while with shame. "Go slowly, Humphrey," she caught, in a rich, sweet voice; "I want to listen to the music." "She plays really wonderfully. I have never heard playing I preferred to hers," came in a well-known deeper voice, at which Chloris's cheeks waxed hotter still. She pressed her foot on the pedal and shut herself within a wall of dinning, buzzing sound. When she had lifted it, and risen, the road was empty, the night silent, but for the crickets and the distant surf, as the grave. * * * * *