On the following day her work with Sir James Carus was of absorbing interest, and she came home tired and preoccupied with it. Yet her dreams of the night before recurred in forms at once more confused and more poignant. At two o'clock in the morning she awoke, crying aloud: "I must get Milly back"; and her pillow was wet with tears. For the two following hours she must have been awake, because she heard all the quarters strike from a neighboring church-tower, yet they appeared like a prolonged nightmare. The emotional impression of some forgotten dream remained, and she passed them in an agony of grief for she knew not what, of remorse for having on a certain summer afternoon denied Milly's petition for her assistance, and of intense volition, resembling prayer, for Milly's return. CHAPTER XXXI The intense heat of early afternoon quivered on the steep woods which fell to the river opposite the house. The sunlit stream curved under them, moving clear and quiet over depths of brown, tangled water-growths, and along its fringe of gray and green reeds and grasses and creamy plumes of meadow-sweet. The house was not very large. It was square and white; an old wistaria, an old Gloire-de-Dijon, and a newer carmine cluster-rose contended for possession of its surface. Striped awnings were down over all the lower windows and some of the upper. A large lawn, close-shorn and velvety green, as only Thames-side lawns can be, stretched from the house to the river. It had no flower-beds on it, but a cedar here, an ilex there, dark and substantial on their own dark shadows, and trellises and pillars overrun by a flood of roses of every shade, from deep crimson to snow white. The lawn was surrounded by shrubberies and plantations, and beyond it there was nothing to be seen except the opposite woods and the river, and sometimes boats passing by with a measured sound of oars in the rowlocks, or the temporary commotion of a little steam-launch. It looked a respectable early Victorian house, but it had never been quite that, for it had been built by George Goring's father fifty years earlier, and he himself had spent much of his boyhood there. Everything and every one seemed asleep, except a young man in flannels with a flapping hat hanging over his eyes, who stood at the end of a punt and pretended to fish. There was no one to look at him or at the house behind him, and if there had been observers, they would not have guessed that they were looking at the Garden of Eden and that he was Adam. Only last evening he and that fair Eve of his had stood by the river in the moonlight, where the shattering hawthorn-bloom made the air heavy with sweetness, and had spoken to each other of this their exquisite, undreamed-of happiness. There had been a Before, there would be an After, when they must stand on their defence against the world, must resist a thousand importunities, heart-breaking prayers, to return to the old, false, fruitless existence.