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they could not say, which neither could understand well enough to form into words, and yet which they felt between them like an impalpable tie.
    “There are women who wouldn’t let it exist,” he continued, with a doggedness which ignored his paradox. But Ada did not smile.
    “Well,” sighed Richard Milne at last. “We don’t seem to know that we have been apart for a long time.”
    They smiled, lost in a sense of this, of being together, and that each dearly-lost moment gave its measure of almost painful bliss. Looking at the clear profile of Ada Lethen, he felt his heart rise, as though it would break his body apart. The mazed night could have lasted forever, it might have been the beginning or end of eternity.
    They exchanged little words, about his travels, how the village seemed to him, changes … almost as though shy. And a wave of tender memory came over Richard Milne at herquestions, her concern. He saw those days mysterious and full of homely poetry, when he had been a boy in these fields – an evocation of weather, irrelevant transitory conditions, neighbours, above all the surveillance of these over the Lethen family, which had drawn to it his child’s curiosity. The odd and vivid little girl of whom he was conscious sitting at one side and behind him in the schoolhouse; their awakening to each other which seemed without beginning; the silence between them, always the silence, and the forbidding looks which he read in the constraint of either of her parents he inadvertently met. The secret coming out at last from the mouth of gossip that wondered at his not always having known. All these made a medium through which translucently to see Ada Lethen – an image of sleet frozen upon maple buds.
    “You do not love them,” he continued slowly, half-unwilling to voice his thought. “But that does not cause you to change your attitude toward me. You’re no kinder or more – reasonable. I dare say if you hated them you’d think that gave you the right, or the obligation to care for their needs.” The cruelty of his suffering was speaking now.
    “Hate? I can never hate them – it would be impossible.” Yet she had answered so swiftly, with an involuntary look at him, that he felt he had probed her most secret dread. “Only pity. It is pity which – Pity will kill me!” she exclaimed with sudden wildness, as though the words themselves lent to her sense a foretaste of ultimate bitterness.
    “I can’t! I can’t!”
    She was sobbing words against his shoulder, while all his thoughts, the froth on the billow of his emotion flew scattered by this sudden contact. And he had come determined not to touch her hand, for the havoc it would be to him afterward. Now he held her, tightly, speaking incoherently.
    “Precious Ada! This is going to kill you. Ada! Let us go away. You must! We can live a different life from this. We’ll go –”
    All the time her tears were changing something in his mind. The hot tears fell on his hands, and he began to try to comfort her. It was as though they were children again, and she had cried, as she did once, about something some of the other children said, and he had offered her his handkerchief. The years were broken up and their emotions returned upon him in a confused avalanche, while he held her, and at the same time he was in the present, his arms were holding her as they had longed to do.
    “Let us go away!” he heard himself repeating in a tone of anguished pleading which was almost maudlin.
    The night was flowing past them, through the trees, past them in cold vines of the veranda of the decayed house. And it seemed as though they were being left, stranded in an unimaginable waste beyond life, alone and not together, deserted even of hot and frenzied words, while the mystery of the earth and the skies became in imminence torturingly sweet.

FOUR
    A t this moment something made Richard Milne aware of a stirring in the room behind them. There was still light enough