He threw wide open the three French windows and prowled about the large dim room. “You know why.” God in Heaven, what was she talking about! How could he know why?--and what was there to know? He prowled about the room.... They had been good friends, amazingly good friends. He had relied on her to understand that. Good Lord, everything he had done to her or had not done to her had been in friendship! Surely she had understood that.... She had seemed to.... Fourteen, fifteen years.... Why, she couldn’t have expected him to behave like an impassioned lover all the time! Fifteen years.... There were moments.... When he came back from any of his travels and saw her, he loved her madly. It was like a choke in the heart when he saw her on his returns, that marvellous tawny Gloria with the funny crooked smile. Oh, child, child, what have you done? He had treated her like a friend.... And what was the use of having a great friend if you had to write letters to her? He never wrote letters when he was abroad; he hated writing letters. Of course she had understood that.... And he prowled about the large dim room, through the clear throbbing stillness, for the face of the moon hung over distant Carmion Wood and leered genially into the room. He did not understand.... At last he sat down in a great chair by the fireplace, and as he sat there he thought how, after his many returns, he had sat on that chair and taken Gloria to his knee and loved her. And Aubrey Carlyle cried for the first time in his life.... III He sat there, a very solitary man, and his eyes wandered vaguely through the open windows over the bewitched countryside, his gardens and his park and his acres and his forests, shrouded all in a clear gloom as though God was peering at them in the light of a taper. And the heavy moon climbed the heavens. He saw the twisted shapes of tall flowers in the garden, flowers he did not know, for his head-gardener was a man of invention in August. And then, among the tall shapes of the August flowers, he saw one in particular, and this one was the tallest among them, and it moved. But he sat very still and solemn in his chair, watching the shape of the moving flower, between him and the heavy moon. And then it wavered and stood; for a long time it stood, a shadow in the wan countryside. Perhaps it was afraid, all alone there among the flowers. He watched. And then it was framed in the open window, a soft slim shadow. But he did not move. “What sort of a play is this,” he heard his voice ask, “in which a woman goes away like a coward and comes back like a wraith?” And into the room she came, and with a sigh she sat down in a chair by the window. “Oh, dear!” she sighed. “I am so tired....”