Tom fell behind with Grace. He did not know exactly how he had managed it, or whether any management at all had been required; but so it was that when they came out into the moonlit road, he and Grace were together. He looked down upon her with a beating heart. Words came thronging to his lips, but he could not speak them. She seemed to have moved further away from him than ever. This white light of moon and stars in which she walked was, to his excited fancy, like the mystic world that was her home, and she in her light garments, her pale gold hair all ruffled by the breeze, making an aureole like a saint's halo round her beautiful face, was as lovely, and alas! as unapproachable as a vision. Silently they go along the interval of road that separated Mrs. Gregory's grounds from those of General Elton. And now they are in the little dark shrubbery behind the lawn and rose garden. Here Tom, who has been sighing like a furnace, pulls up in desperation, for he feels that his opportunity is slipping away from him. 'Are you tired?' he says in a shaken voice. 'Oh, no!' answers Grace, only a little more firmly. 'I am not at all tired.' 'Then won't you come down to the river for a few moments?' he says pleadingly. 'It looks so pretty in this light.' His heart is thumping against his ribs, and there is a singing in his ears which nearly deafens him. He hears indeed so imperfectly that he is on the point of apologising humbly for having made a preposterous suggestion when he realises that Grace has fallen in with it, that she is, in fact, leading him to a little tangled path through the shrubbery that leads straight to the lower lawn. 'Mind how you go!' says the sweet voice. 'It is dark here, and the branches are low. To the right; now to the left. Trixy calls this the maze.' In a few moments they emerge from the shrubbery, cross an interval of lawn, and stand on the bank above the river, at the very spot where Tom saw his vision of the night before. 'Isn't it lovely?' says Grace, in a low voice. 'Come here, under the willows, where the shadows are deep, and look down!' 'How dark and silent it is!' says Tom. 'Silent, but never still. I don't know how it is,' says Grace, with a little sigh, 'but flowing water always makes me feel tired.' 'It is the constant movement. I have felt that too. But sit down, darling. Don't look at it----' She interrupts him a little impatiently. 'No; you don't understand. It is not _that_ weariness; it is of the mind. I think of life; how it is going on, always, always. No rest, not for a single moment; dying, being born, loving, hating, thinking, fighting, suffering, sinning. It is terrible.' 'But it is beautiful too, Grace.' 'It may be, or perhaps indifferent. To one here and there; one like the river that receives but cannot give.' 'What do you mean, Grace?'