His few days at Chuzenji had passed in a kind of stifled fever. The report of Barbara's engagement had added its poisoned barb. That morning, however, a careless remark had torn across his mood as sheet-lightning tears the weaving dusk. Tokyo was talking of it--of _him_!--making a jest of that sweet, dead thing in his heart? The thought had stung his pride, and there had grown in him a sharp sense of humiliation at his own cowardice. The afternoon had found him riding down the mountain trail to Nikko. To-morrow he would go back to Tokyo--to the round of gaieties that would now be hateful, and to his work. He put out his hand to one of the benches in the deep pine-shadow, but drew it back with a sharp breath. A sliver of the warped wood had pierced his knuckle to the bone. Frowning, he wrapped the bleeding member in his handkerchief and sat down at the bench's other end, bitterly absorbed. The vagrant, intermittent moonlight touched the tumbling water below with creeping silver, and on the horizon, where the cloud-bank frayed away, one white constellation swung low, a cluster of lamps in golden chains. But Daunt's thought had no place for the delicate beauty of the night. His pipe was long since cold, and he knocked out the dead ashes against the bench, and did not relight it. He thought of Tokyo, that to-morrow would stretch so blank and irksome, of the humdrum tedium of the Chancery, in which a few days ago he had worked so blithely. Then all had been interest and beauty. Now the future stretched before him dull and savorless, an arid Desert of Gobi, through whose thirsty waste he must trudge on for ever to a comfortless goal. How long he sat there with bowed head he could not have told, but at length he rose heavily to his feet As he did so he became aware of a sound below him--a footfall, coming toward him. It crossed a bar of the moonlight. He shrank, and a tremor ran over him, for it was Barbara. She had thrown over her a loose cloak, and a bit of soft, clinging lace showed between its dark edges. Her brilliant hair was loosely gathered in a single braid, and in the moonlight it shone like beaten copper against the vivid pallor of her face. He sat stirless, smitten with confusion, conscious that a movement must betray him. A painful embarrassment enveloped him, a fastidious sense of shrinking from her sight of him. He felt a dull wave of resentment that an antic irony of circumstance should have brought them beneath the same roof--to make him seem the moody pursuer, the unwelcome trespasser on her reserve--and that now thrust him into a position which at any hazard he would have shunned. But all thought of himself, all feeling save one vanished, when, with sudden piteous abandon, she threw herself on her knees by the bench and broke into slow sobs, shuddering and tearless.