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'I hope so,' she murmured, so that he could scarcely hear. The silence grew, big with all that 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 for ever, 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 her questions, 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.