“Then say ten,” he persisted, marveling at his own unpremeditated deadly earnestness; and still again she stood silent. But she found the courage to lift her intent eyes and let them rest on his face. It seemed significant of tremendous capitulations. But when she spoke she spoke very quietly. “I’ll be there.” Conkling watched her retreat into the shadow and watched the faded door swing slowly shut between them. Then he turned and went down the steps. He went away this time without thinking of the pictures, and he went with no slightest sense of disappointment. CHAPTER FIVE Conkling, as he waited in the shadowy arbor, was conscious of a series of rhythms. One was the distant rise and fall of lake water on its pebbled shore. Another was the antiphonal call of katydids from the mass of shrubbery behind him. Still another was the stridulous chorus of the crickets in the parched grass, rising and falling with a cadence of its own. And still another was the beat of his own pulse, quickened with an expectancy which tended to disturb him. He waited for almost half an hour. Then Julia Keswick came ghost-like out of the dusk, heavy with its mingled smell of phlox and mignonette. He stood up, once he was sure who it was. She, too, stood, without speaking, face to face with him in the filtered moonlight. “Was it hard?” he asked inadequately and with a quaver in his voice. She missed his small gesture of self-accusation in the darkness. “It was dangerous,” she admitted, more composedly than he had expected. “What would happen if they knew?” he questioned, more conscious of her nearness than of the words he was uttering. “I could never go back,” she told him. The forlornness of her voice, for all its composure, brought a surge of pity through his body. There was, however, something faintly dismissive in her movement as she sat down on the rough seat. “I want to talk to you about the pictures,” she said in a more resolute voice. “But I’d much rather talk about you,” he objected, and he waited, with his heart in his mouth, to see if she challenged that audacity. “I’ve seen you only three times before to-night,” she said, staring off through a break in the shrubbery where a stretch of the lake lay like moving quicksilver. “Well, a good deal can happen in that time,” he argued, wondering where his courage had gone. “I’ve found that out,” she said with her Keswick candor. He leaned closer to see her face. She did not move. “Everything seemed clouded and hopeless before you came,” he heard her saying. “Oh, you’re still thinking of the pictures,” he said, with a note of disappointment. She laughed, almost inaudibly. “I wish we didn’t have to think about them,” she told him. He found something oddly inflammatory in that acknowledgment. “Then let’s not think about them,” he suggested. “Why should we, on a night like this?”