His joy in the thought of her increased. He recalled the tones of her voice, and the ring of her happy laughter, and dwelt upon things that she had said. They were nothing; they might have been said by anybody; none of them at which he smiled to himself were so worth remembering as the things that little Jane often said and he had remembered afterwards, smiling at them too, but not with that tenderness of feeling towards them.
He came to the park wall, where there was a door to which he kept the key. He seldom went outside the park on his night roamings. The woods continued here for some distance before the open ground was reached, though by the ride he had taken in the afternoon they ended with the wall, in which there was another locked gate. If he wanted to go on to the moor at night, and stand beneath the open sky, with nothing about him but space, it was by that path that he reached it. But he seemed to have had a purpose, unknown to him, in making for this door, and when he reached it he had no thought but for passing beyond the bounds of the park. It was by that path that the cottage in which Viola was could be reached most directly. He knew when he came to the door, but not before, that he meant to go to it.
He had left the key behind, but scaled the wall, not without some difficulty, and went on through the wood. By and by he came to a garden fence, and there beyond it, across the fruit bushes and the untidy tangle of late summer, was the cottage, low and thatched and whitewashed, in which she was sleeping.
He stood still and drew his breath.
Viola!
There was a little dormer window in the thatch, open. It might be that of the room in which she was sleeping. A cottager would not sleep in a room with the window open. He tried to remember what the cottage was like inside, and what rooms would be most likely to be given up to visitors. It seemed to him of the utmost importance to have it settled which was Viola's room.
He moved round to the front of the cottage, treading softly on the turf lest a sound should reveal his presence. Perhaps she was awake. It was not part of their secret that he should come out at night to gaze at her window. He must not reveal himself.
The wood extended a little way on to the moor by the side of the cottage. It was the point that had hidden it from them in the afternoon. But it faced open ground across a narrow fenced-in strip of garden. The whole of its front could be seen obliquely from the wood.
He stood in the shadow of a giant holly—and saw her.
She was sitting at a window, her chin resting on her hand, looking out across the moor to where the sea lay gleaming in the radiance of the moon. She was in white; her dusky hair lay about her shoulders and framed her young face, in which the dark eyes were set.