On the third evening after his passage of arms with Courtier, he was again at her little white cottage sheltering within its high garden walls.  Smothered in roses, and with a black-brown thatch overhanging the old-fashioned leaded panes of the upper windows, it had an air of hiding from the world.  Behind, as though on guard, two pine trees spread their dark boughs over the outhouses, and in any south-west wind could be heard speaking gravely about the weather.  Tall lilac bushes flanked the garden, and a huge lime-tree in the adjoining field sighed and rustled, or on still days let forth the drowsy hum of countless small dusky bees who frequented that green hostelry.

He found her altering a dress, sitting over it in her peculiar delicate fashion—­as if all objects whatsoever, dresses, flowers, books, music, required from her the same sympathy.

He had come from a long day’s electioneering, had been heckled at two meetings, and was still sore from the experience.  To watch her, to be soothed, and ministered to by her had never been so restful; and stretched out in a long chair he listened to her playing.

Over the hill a Pierrot moon was slowly moving up in a sky the colour of grey irises.  And in a sort of trance Miltoun stared at the burnt-out star, travelling in bright pallor.

Across the moor a sea of shallow mist was rolling; and the trees in the valley, like browsing cattle, stood knee-deep in whiteness, with all the air above them wan from an innumerable rain as of moondust, falling into that white sea.  Then the moon passed behind the lime-tree, so that a great lighted Chinese lantern seemed to hang blue-black from the sky.

Suddenly, jarring and shivering the music, came a sound of hooting.  It swelled, died away, and swelled again.

Miltoun rose.

“That has spoiled my vision,” he said.  “Mrs. Noel, I have something I want to say.”  But looking down at her, sitting so still, with her hands resting on the keys, he was silent in sheer adoration.

A voice from the door ejaculated: 

“Oh! ma’am—­oh! my lord!  They’re devilling a gentleman on the green!”

CHAPTER VI

When the immortal Don set out to ring all the bells of merriment, he was followed by one clown.  Charles Courtier on the other hand had always been accompanied by thousands, who really could not understand the conduct of this man with no commercial sense.  But though he puzzled his contemporaries, they did not exactly laugh at him, because it was reported that he had really killed some men, and loved some women.  They found such a combination irresistible, when coupled with an appearance both vigorous and gallant.  The son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and mounted on a lost cause, he had been riding through the world ever since he was eighteen, without once getting out of the saddle.  The secret of this