She nodded, turned away, lifted the latch of the gate and made her way towards the cottage,--curiously silent, and with no visible sign of habitation except for the smoke curling up from the chimney. As she drew nearer to the rustic entrance, she hesitated. A rush of those very sensations at which she had so often gently mocked swept through her consciousness, unsteadying and bewildering her. Mandeleys, imposing in its grim stillness, seemed to be throwing out shadows towards her, catching her up in a whirlpool of memories, half sentimental, half tragical. It was in the little cottage garden where she now stood, and in the woods beyond, that she had wandered with that strange new feeling in her heart of which she was, even at that moment, intensely conscious, gazing through the mists of her inexperience towards the new world and new heaven which her love was unfolding before her. A hundred forgotten fancies flashed into her brain. She remembered, with a singular and most unnerving accuracy, the silent vigils which she had spent, half hidden amongst those tall hollyhocks. She had seen the grey twilight of morning pass, seen the mists roll away and, turret by turret, the great house stand out like some fairy palace fashioned from space in a single night. She had seen the thrushes hop from the shrubberies and coverts on to the dew-spangled lawn, had heard their song, growing always in volume, had seen the faint sunlight flash in the windows, before she had crept back to her room. Another day in that strange turmoil which had followed the coming of her love! She had watched shooting parties assemble in the drive outside, her father in command, she herself hidden yet watchful, her eyes always upon one figure, her thoughts with him. And then the nights--the summer nights--when men and women in evening costume strolled down from the house. She could see their white shirt fronts glistening in the twilight. Again she heard the firm yet loitering step and the quiet, still voice which had changed the world for her. "Is Vont about, Miss Marcia?" she would hear him say. "I want to have a talk with him about the partridge drives to-morrow." She closed her eyes. The smell of the honeysuckle and the early cottage roses seemed suddenly almost stupefying. There were a few seconds--perhaps even a minute--before Vont had donned his brown velveteen coat and issued from the cottage--just time for a whispered word, a glance, a touch of the fingers.--Marcia felt her knees shake as she lingered underneath the porch. She was swept with recalcitrant memories, stinging like the lash of a whip. Perhaps this new wisdom of hers was, after all, a delusion, the old standards of her Calvinistic childhood unassailable. Then, for the first time, she was conscious of a familiar figure. Richard Vont was seated in a hard kitchen chair at the end of the garden, with a book upon his knee and his face turned to Mandeleys. At