"They must take their chance. I wish I knew the hour." "You said it must be two o'clock." "The sun does not rise till half-past five. Three hours and a half. I wonder why we left the chariot. It would be wiser to go back. You will be cold in this open country." The wind was blowing shrewdly up there in the starlight, and Phyllida would not deny she was cold and tired. "We had better go back to the chaise. 'Twas warmer in the valley." Yet both of them felt a strange disinclination to risk the disillusion of return till, suddenly, up there in the wind and starlight, terror caught them, and the noise of water tumbling over rocks gave them a sense of security from this wide place of silence. "'Tis a monstrous uneasy country," said Vernon, voicing in common speech the sense of woe that oppressed him. "I feel frightened," Phyllida agreed, "let us go back to the water." They stopped to listen as people will whose minds have been much wrought upon. There was nothing but the lisp of the wind in the bents of last year's grass and a melo-dious sighing in the boughs of larches. Yet never throughout that adventurous night had Phyllida's heart pattered at such a pace, never had she been so near to shrieking aloud. Without longer delay they turned back in the direction of the coombe, walking with quick steps as if to avoid an invisible pursuit. Half-way down the hill, Vernon stooped to gather a primrose. "Here's a daisy," he said. "A daisy," Phyllida cried. "Why, foolish Amor, 'tis a primrose," and whatever fiend or goblin followed in their wake fled in affright at the sound of her rippling laughter. I think nothing shows more conclusively that Mr. Vernon was in love with Miss Courteen than his indifference to her ridicule. "Sweetest," he said, "I'm ignorant of the best things like flowers," and forthwith began to tell Phyllida of his life in London, so that when presently they stood again upon the bridge, he was raising his voice in order to describe his first impressions of rustick Marybone, to which he added a very nice account of the view of the Hampstead Hills. Under the influence of this narrative, the scene lost some of its grandeur. An air of grottoes, of stone embellishments, arbours, and cunning recesses shed itself over the landskip. One heard comparisons with this or that famous haunt of sight-seeing mobs. In fact both Vernon and Phyllida, being English, felt their late raptures were unbecoming, and having excused a lapse into sensibility by the fright they had suffered, proceeded to declare that the chasm, far from being Titanick, would make a mighty fine site for an excursion of pleasure. At least Vernon clothed the opinion in words, Phyllida was too much fatigued to do more than murmur a weary assent.