would not turn on the light, unwilling to admit that it was really getting late, but began to change her dress, lingering desperately over every little detail of her toilette, deriving therefrom a faint, mysterious comfort, trying to make herself feel beautiful.  From sheer dread of going back before he came, she let her hair fall, though it was quite smooth and tidy, and began brushing it.  Suddenly she thought with horror of her efforts at adornment—­by specially preparing for him, she must seem presumptuous to Fate.  At any little sound she stopped and stood listening—­save for her hair and eyes, as white from head to foot as a double narcissus flower in the dusk, bending towards some faint tune played to it somewhere oft in the fields.  But all those little sounds ceased, one after another—­they had meant nothing; and each time, her spirit returning—­within the pale walls of the room, began once more to inhabit her lingering fingers.  During that hour in her bedroom she lived through years.  It was dark when she left it.

CHAPTER XVI

When Miltoun at last came it was past nine o’clock.

Silent, but quivering all over; she clung to him in the hall; and this passion of emotion, without sound to give it substance, affected him profoundly.  How terribly sensitive and tender she was!  She seemed to have no armour.  But though so stirred by her emotion, he was none the less exasperated.  She incarnated at that moment the life to which he must now resign himself—­a life of unending tenderness, consideration, and passivity.

For a long time he could not bring himself to speak of his decision.  Every look of her eyes, every movement of her body, seemed pleading with him to keep silence.  But in Miltoun’s character there was an element of rigidity, which never suffered him to diverge from an objective once determined.

When he had finished telling her, she only said: 

“Why can’t we go on in secret?”

And he felt with a sort of horror that he must begin his struggle over again.  He got up, and threw open the window.  The sky was dark above the river; the wind had risen.  That restless murmuration, and the width of the night with its scattered stars, seemed to come rushing at his face.  He withdrew from it, and leaning on the sill looked down at her.  What flower-like delicacy she had!  There flashed across him the memory of a drooping blossom, which, in the Spring, he had seen her throw into the flames; with the words:  “I can’t bear flowers to fade, I always want to burn them.”  He could see again those waxen petals yield to the fierce clutch of the little red creeping sparks, and the slender stalk quivering, and glowing, and writhing to blackness like a live thing.  And, distraught, he began: 

“I can’t live a lie.  What right have I to lead, if I can’t follow?  I’m not like our friend Courtier who believes in Liberty.  I never have, I never shall.  Liberty?  What is Liberty?  But only those who conform to authority have the right to wield authority.  A man is a churl who enforces laws, when he himself has not the strength to observe them.  I will not be one of whom it can be said:  ’He can rule others, himself——!”