nothing distasteful in what you have to say. It may cause awkwardness with Sir Tobias; but if you can assure me that you're really in earnest over Terry, I'll be quite willing to risk that in order to become your ally."
He smiled towards her through the darkness. "There's nothing I should like better than to reckon you as my ally. And now I see why we've been talking at cross-purposes. You think that I've come to wheedle Terry's address out of you. Perhaps I have, since you've put the idea into my head. And with regard to my earnestness, nothing except Terry in the whole world matters. She's romance, self-fulfillment and, as you've said, the last dream of my youth. If I supposed that I were going to lose her, I would rather not have—— But I didn't come here to burden you with my troubles. I came to do something for you—something which I've tried to avoid doing. Something which has forced itself upon me and followed me until—— It's as though I'd been compelled by a personality outside myself. I may make you very unhappy——"
She leant forward, bringing her face so close that he could feel the fanning of her breath. The moon was newly risen; as it shone on the mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges. In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had never seen such calmness.
And the calmness was not alone in her expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that her sympathy could not encompass—nothing that he need be ashamed to tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was filled with a strange sense of gratitude.
Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.
"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one—not even you—has the power to do that."
VIII
He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."
A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth? You yourself tell the truth—— When they say that I never cry, they mean that I never let them see me."
He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man. Not to cry at all would be