Everard’s excited mood, however, did not last; perhaps he danced out some of his bitterness; violent exercise is good for all violent feeling, and calms it down. He came to himself with a strange shock, when--one of the latest to leave, as he had been one of the earliest to go--he came suddenly out from the lighted rooms, and noisy music, and chattering voices, to the clear cold wintry moonlight, deep in the frosty night, or rather early on the frosty morning of the next day. There are some people who take to themselves, in our minds at least, a special phase of nature, and plant their own image in the midst of it with a certain arrogance, so that we cannot dissociate the sunset from one of those usurpers, or the twilight from another. In this way Reine had taken possession of the moonlight for Everard. It was no doing of hers, nor was she aware of it; but still it was the case. He never saw the moon shining without remembering the little balcony at Kandersteg, and the whiteness with which her head rose out of the dark shadow of the rustic wooden framework. How could he help but think of her now, when worn out by a gayety which had not been quite real, he suddenly fell, as it were, into the silence, the clear white light, the frost-bound, chill, cold blue skies above him, full of frosty, yet burning stars, and the broad level shining of that ice-cold moon? Everard, like other people at his time of life, and in his somewhat unsettled condition of mind, had a way of feeling somewhat “low” after being very gay. It is generally the imaginative who do this, and is a sign, I think, of a higher nature; but Everard had the disadvantage of it without the good, for he was not of a poetical mind--though I suppose there must have been enough poetry in him to produce this reaction. When it came on, as it always did after the noisy gayety of the Hatch, he had, in general, one certain refuge to which he always betook himself. He thought of Reine--Reine, who was gay enough, had nature permitted her to have her way, but whom love had separated from everything of the kind, and transplanted into solitude and quiet, and the moonlight, which, in his mind, was dedicated to her image; this was his resource when he was “low;” and he turned to it as naturally as the flowers turn to the sun. Reine was his imagination, his land of fancy, his unseen world, to Everard; but lo! on the very threshold of this secret region of dreams, the young man felt himself pulled up and stopped short. Reine’s letter rolled up before him like a black curtain shutting out his visionary refuge. Had he lost her? he asked himself, with a sudden thrill of visionary panic. Her image had embodied all poetry, all romance, to him, and had it fled from his firmament? The girls whom he had left had no images at all, so to speak; they were flesh and blood realities, pleasant enough, so long as you were with them, and often very amusing