“I have never been troubled here.”

“God save the chance that you ever should. We can walk back together, now that we have met.”

She had no excuse with which to parry his grave frankness. Had life promised another meaning she might have suffered herself to be touched by the message that his manhood seemed to utter. And to John Gore, walking at her side, the rose-trees that had bloomed in the quaint gardens were budding again into crimson flame. The high hedgerows were full of golden light, caught and held in the mysterious shadow-net of the dusk.

Under his arm were the pistols that he had bought at the gunsmith’s shop in the street near the New Exchange. He little thought that Barbara Purcell had been bound for that very place, where steel barrels glistened row by row in the oak racks against the wall. Chance, and their meeting, had prevented her that day, and her first impulse had been one of anger and impatience. It was not easy to slip away alone and unobserved from the house in Pall Mall. John Gore had marred the first endeavor. She could but pretend tolerance, and hold to that patience that counts upon the morrow.

Yet, when he was leaving her as the dusk fell, she felt like one nearing the grim and incredible climax of a dream. It hurt and oppressed her to be near him, and yet there was an indefinable mystery in his nearness that made her heart cry out against the inevitable doom of all desire.

“Good-night.”

She felt that he stood and watched her with those grave eyes of his after she had turned from him along the footway. And the shadow of the coming night seemed more apparent to her soul.

XV

There are few episodes in a man’s life that plunge him into that dim forest world of romance where the woodways are full of whisperings and elfin music, and the gleam of moonlight upon the smooth trunks of mighty trees. In youth romance is a habit; in maturity, a mere digression. The boy is naturally an imaginative creature; he dreams dreams of beauty and strangeness, and of women whose lips suck the blood from the heart. The marriage service sobers him. He ceases his excursions into hypothetical raptures, and becomes the steady, workaday busybody, proud of his house, his table, or his garden, paternally patient with poetical youth. Affection takes the place of that inconvenient thing called passion. To romance he is inert, fuddled—unless one illegitimate fire plays havoc with his respectable tranquillity.