She sat and stared and listened. Not from her own heart, as she at first thought, did these sounds of trouble ring in her dream: attuned to trouble as it was, her heart had but echoed another’s misery. Something—what was it? Nothing human, surely—was appealing, calling with moans and whines, like that of some piteous trapped animal that clamours to the unhearing skies. Aye, and that square of closed moonlit window, where there should be but the silhouette of an ivy spray or two, was blocked out by some monstrous shape. Again she thought it was nothing human, though the casement shook and there were sounds of taps as if from desperate hands. Her pulses beat thick and hard in her temples and she had a moment’s paralysing terror. But she was at least a fearless woman. The next instant she sprang out of bed, and wrapping herself in the cloak that lay to her hand, she seized the rushlight and advanced boldly. Before raising an alarm she would see for herself what the thing was. She had not reached within a yard of the window, when with an exclamation of mingled relief and astonishment, she laid the light aside and sprang forward and flung open the casement. “Barnaby!” she cried, and drew the boy by main force into the room. He fell like a dead weight at her feet, exhausted, unable to sustain himself, his hands feebly closing upon the hem of her garment as if thereby clinging to safety. On the wall of the Herb-Garden the young poetaster Herrick had sought a sentimental seat from which he could feast his love-lorn gaze on the windows of Mrs. Marvel’s chamber; and, watching the tiny flickering light within rise and sink against the naked panes, feast his heart on God knows what innocently passionate dreams. It was an ideal night for such dreamings; and the Italian-soft airs that blew upon young Romeo’s cheek could scarcely have been more tender than this English Lammas-night breath that gently fanned young Luke’s ardour. A night of nights to sit lost in luxurious despair, to rock a fancied sorrow and a fanciful love with poetic metre and rhyme; to weave the sacred thought of the lady’s bower with the melancholy of the moonlit hour, the sob of unrequited love with the plaint of the night-bird in the grove. To this idyllic love-dream what an awakening! Shattering these ideals how brutal, how horrid a reality! There came running steps in the shaded garden paths, a black, furtive figure across a white-lit garden space; and then—Herrick looked and rubbed his eyes like a child and looked again before he could believe—a man’s figure, to his distressed vision tall and largely proportioned, climbing, yes, ye gods! climbing up, up, the ivy ropes, up to that window where his own fancy hardly dared to-night to reach, albeit with such reverend haltings, with such swoonings almost from its own temerity.