"Oh, well—" she conceded; and hand in hand, like two children, they began to walk toward the house. Barely screened by its tracery of leafless willows it stood out more prominent and turreted than he had remembered; but if less romantic, it still seemed to him as mysterious. Treading noiselessly on the rain-flattened yellowish grass they passed around to the other front, where the projecting verandah and obliquely set balconies, clutched in the bare gnarled arms of the wistaria, stood out like the torso of an old Laocoön.

A few oaks still held their foliage, and the evergreen clumps stood out blue-black and solid. But the fall of the leaves revealed, at the end of a path, a rickety trellised arbour which Vance had never before noticed. "Let's go and sit there." They crossed the wet cobwebby lawn and entered the arbour. The old hired man was nowhere to be seen, and Vance drew Laura Lou to him and laid his lips on her eyelids. "Ever since yesterday I've wanted to kiss your eyes." She laughed under her breath, and they sat close to each other on the mouldy bench.

"You never used to take any notice of me in old times," she said; and he answered: "I was nothing but a blind puppy then. Puppies are all born blind… ." He wanted to let his kiss glide down to her lips, but she put him from her. The gentleness of her touch controlled him; but he whispered rebelliously: "Why—why?"

She answered that all she had promised was to come and talk things over with him, and he mustn't tease, or she'd have to go away; and why couldn't they just sit there quietly, when there was so much to say and so little time? He hardly heard what she said, but there was a power in her softness—or in her beauty, perhaps—which held him subdued. "Your hand, then—?" "Yes." She gave it back, with one of those smiles which made her mouth like the inside of a flower. Oh, idle metaphors! …