Time runs on. Some one yawns, and then tries vainly to turn it into a sigh. The bell from some distant steeple in the little slumbering village far below in the plain, tolls slowly, solemnly, as though to warn them that eleven more hours have slipped into the great and fathomless sea of Eternity.
"Ah! so late!" says Dulce, with a little start. "How swiftly time has gone to-night. I never knew it fly with such hot haste. That proves I have been happy, does it not?"
She smiles down upon Mr. Gower, who is still at her feet, and he smiles up only too willingly at her.
At this moment a dark figure emerges from amongst the moaning firs, and comes toward them. In the uncertain and somewhat ghostly light it appears of an unusually large size. Dulce draws her breath a little quickly, and Julia, feeling her duty lies in this direction, gives way to a dainty scream. Portia, whose eyes have been upon this new comer for a full minute before the others noticed him, only turns her head away, and lets it sink a degree more lazily into the cushion of her chair.
The firs mounting high into the sky, stand out boldly against their azure background. Fabian, in answer to Julia's touch of affectation, advances with more haste, and says:
"It is only me," in his usual clear, slow voice.
Passing by Portia's chair, he drops into her lap a little bunch of dark blue flowers.
"Ah!" she says quickly, then checks herself. Taking up the deeply-dyed blossoms, she lays them in her pink palm, and, bending her face over them, examines them silently. Sir Mark, regarding her curiously from the background, wonders whether she is thinking of them or of their donor.
"Why, those are the flowers we were talking about," says Dulce, with a faint contraction of her brows. "Fabian! Did you risk your life to get them?"
"Your life!" says Portia, in an indescribable tone, and as if the words are drawn from her against her will. I think she had made up her mind to keep utter silence, but some horror connected with Dulce's hasty remark has unbound her lips. She turns her eyes upon him, and he can see by the moonlight that her face is very white.