LITMIR.BIZ

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some childish fault. Rachel’s father, a taciturn and loveless old man, had recently died, leaving his daughter, whom he had practically cast off, a small but secure annuity and a little house on the east coast.

      It was now to this home of her ancestors, in the village of Rodmoor, that Rachel Doorm was anxious to transport both sisters; partly as a return for what Nance’s mother, and more recently Nance herself, had done for her support, and partly out of fanatical devotion to Nance.

      The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of infinite relief at the thought of being freed from her uncongenial work in the dressmaker’s establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her sister towards the projected change.

      And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it had been at first.

      None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular afternoon, the girl’s dreamy and absorbed happiness.

      In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind wander in languid retrospect, from that seat in Kensington Park, over every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this.

      She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her, like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man’s hands.

      It was quite early in April when she saw him; and she remembered, sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one—here a basket of daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom—into the street she traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should never have come to her before—that she should have lived absolutely fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday—only made her abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire.

      “It is love—it is love,” she thought; “and I will give myself up to it!”

      And she had given herself up to it. It had penetrated her with an exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it. She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating, languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the name of the man whose wordless pursuit of her had stirred her senses to this exultant response.

      She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet; a desire—she remembered it well now—that had a tinge of unformulated fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers.

      So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning walks to the historic bridge; careful—after she had once passed him, and their eyes had met—never so much as to turn her head, to see if he were following.

      And yet she knew—as well in those first days as she knew now—that every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by.

      And she had known, too—how could she not know?—that this mute signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day by day she put off this event; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she moved, to wish to destroy it, either for better or for worse.

      If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her; all would have been different.

      Then she would have taken some desperate step—some step that would have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all, ready as none else could be ready, to cry with a great cry—“Lord, behold thine hand-maid; do unto her according to Thy will!” But she had known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast.

      And in answer she had given herself up to him; given herself, she thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of delicious dreaming, she gave herself up to him now.

      She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never—never for a moment—in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question of any possible future with him. In the trance-like hours wherein she had brooded so tenderly over the form and face of her nameless lover, she always pictured him as standing waiting for her, a tall, bowed, foreign-looking figure, clothed in the long weather-stained Inverness—the very texture of which she seemed to know the touch of—by that corner curb-stone where the flower-shop was.

      Just in that manner, with just that air of ardent expectation, he might be found standing, she had felt, through unnumbered days of enchantment, and she passing by, in silence, with the same expectant thrill.

      Such a love draught, not drained, not feverishly drunk of, but sweet in her mouth with the taste of a mystic consecration, seemed still, even now that she had him there beside her, to hold the secret, amid this warm breath of London’s first lilacs, of a triumphant Present, wherein both Past and Future were abolished.

      It seemed to the happy girl on this unique April afternoon, while the sliding hours, full of the city’s monotonous murmur, sank unnoticed away, and the gardeners planted their pansies and raked lethargically in the scented mould, as though nothing that could ever happen to her afterwards, could outweigh what she felt then, or matter so very greatly in the final reckoning. With every pulse of her young body she uttered her litany of gratitude. “Ite; missa est” her heart cried—“It is enough.”

      As they walked home afterwards, hand in hand through the dusk of the friendly park, she made him tell her, detail by detail, every least incident of those first days of their encountering. And Adrian Sorio, catching the spirit of that exquisite entreaty, grew voluble even beyond his wont.

      He told her how, in the confusion of his mind, when it was first revealed to him that the devastation he was suffering from did not deny him the sweet sting of “what men call love,” he found it impossible to face with any definite resolution the problem of his doubtful future. He had recognised that in a week or so every penny he possessed would be gone; yet it was impossible—and his new emotion did not, he confessed, alter this in the least—to make any move to secure employment.

      A kind of misanthropic timidity, so he explained to her, made the least thought of finding what is popularly known as “work” eminently repellant to him; yet it was obvious that work must be found, unless he wished, simply and quietly, to end the affair by starvation.

      This, as things went then, he told her, giving her hand a final pressure as they emerged into the lighted streets, he did not at all urgently want—though in the first days of his return from America he had pondered more than once on the question of an easy and agreeable exit. It was as they settled down side by side—her hat no longer held languidly in her gloveless hand—to their long and discreet walk home through the crowded thoroughfares, that she was first startled by hearing the name “Rodmoor” from his lips. How amazing a coincidence! What a miraculous gift of the gods!

      Fate was indeed sweeping her away on a full tide.

      It seemed like a thing in some old fantastic romance. Could it be possible even before she had time to contemplate her separation from him that she should learn that they were not to separate at all!

      Rachel Doorm was indeed a witch—was indeed working things out for her favourite with the power of a sorceress. She kept back her natural cry of delight, “But that is where we are going,” and let him, all unconscious, as it seemed, of the effect of his words, unravel in his own way the thread of his story.

      It was about a certain Baltazar Stork she found he was telling her when her startled thoughts, like a flock of disturbed pigeons, alighted once more on the field of his discourse. Baltazar, it appeared,

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