She walked along, a little in front of him, in the narrow path they had chosen, a short cut to the place where the two rivers meet. She was wearing her thin, clinging white gown, and, without the unromantic adjuncts of hat, parasol, or gloves, she looked as ghostly, as unreal, as far removed from the commonplace, as even she herself could have wished.
They reached the Junction, just outside the Park confines, where the brown moorland flood of the Greta, hasty, capricious, passionate, like herself, merged into the broad, calm flood of the Tees—flowing quietly, in its great volume and depth, over its granite-bouldered bed under Wycliffe. Rivers, for some reason or other, took off his hat, stood—his hair looking quite white in the moonshine—silent, his artist soul, presumably, stirred to the very depths by the mysterious harmonies of tone and magnificent lines of composition which the sight afforded him.
“How well that comes!” he murmured, passionately, while the woman beside him stood breathless, affected, too, by the vision, but in her own way; weaving her fanciful, personal allegories of him, and her, and the two rivers, and longing for some signs in him of the more human enthusiasm that she could have shared.
She shivered, but not from cold. “We must go back!” he said, in response to her unspoken complaint.
They turned and walked up the glen—the moon had gone behind a cloud, and the Greta lay dull and sullen under the hanging terraces of trees. But in the yew grove was darkness unspeakable.
“Oh, I can’t see you,” she murmured, involuntarily; “I shall lose you!”
He silently held out his hand to her, and she took it.
When they came out into the Broad Walk where it was lighter, she dutifully made a little movement to withdraw her hand—a very slight movement—but he did not accept it.
He had forgotten! Was there another man in the world who could thus hold and retain a woman’s hand without knowing it?
In all her life, such pure, unalloyed happiness had not been hers, as they walked up to the gates of the Park together. It was just ten o’clock.