“None at all,” she assured him, “I never... Why, Anthony, are you ill?” Wave after wave of sweetness enveloped him, choking, nauseating, stinging his eyes, extinguishing the fire within him, turning the lust to ashes. He too supported himself upon the rail, and his gaze fell below, to the bushes. Was it the moonlight, or were they, where they had been bare a few minutes before, now covered with great misty masses of lilacs? The perfume of the flowers came up to him breath on breath: he could see them clearly now.... White lilacs! An overwhelming panic swept over him, a sudden dread of his surrounding, of the silken figure of the woman before him. He must get away. He pushed her roughly aside, swung back the screen door, and clattered through the room and down the stair. He fumbled for a moment with a bolted door, and then was outside, free. Without hesitancy he fled into the night, the secretive shadows. He ran until he literally fell, with bursting lungs and shaking, powerless knees, upon a bank. XXVIII THE hotel was lost; the silence, the peace of nature, unbroken. A drowsy flutter of wings stilled in a hedge. The moon sailed behind a cloud that drooped low upon the earth, and great, slow drops of rain fell to a continuous and far reverberation. They struck coolly upon Anthony's face, pattered among the grass, dropped with minute explosions of dust upon the road. The shower passed, the cloud dissolved, and the crystal flood of light fell once more into the cup of the valley. It spread like a balm over Anthony: Hartmann, Mrs. Dallam, the weeping face of Mrs. Kuhn, were like painted figures in a distasteful act upon which he had turned his back, from which he had gone forth into the supreme spectacle of the spheres, the presence of Eliza Dreen. Every atom thrilled with the thought of her. “Oh, my very dear,” he whispered to the sleeping birds, the dead, white disk of the moon: “I will come back to you... good.” After the rain the night was like a damp, sweet veil upon his face; the few stars above him were blurred as though seen through tears; the horizon burned in a circle of flickering, ruddy light. He took up his way once more over the soft folds of the road; now, accustomed to the dark, he could distinguish the smooth pebbles by the way, separate, grey blades of grass. He walked buoyantly, tirelessly, weaving on the loom of the dim miles mingled visions of future and past, dominated by the serene presence of Eliza.