“You mean that you could never love me?” he asked.

She was silent.  A fierce wave of jealousy—­mad, insane, elemental jealousy seemed suddenly to sweep over him.

“You love someone else?” he demanded brusquely.

“What right have you to ask?”

“The right of a man who would gladly die to see you happy.”

He spoke harshly, almost brutally.  Jealousy had killed all humility in him.  Love—­proud, passionate and defiant—­stood up for its just claims, for its existence, its right to dominate, its desire to conquer.

But even as he thus stood before her, almost frightening her now by the violence of his speech, by the latent passion in him, which no longer would bear to be held in check, the bank of clouds which up to now had obscured the brilliance of the summer sky, finally swept away eastwards, revealing the luminous firmament and the pale crescent moon which now glimmered coldly through the branches of the trees.

A muffled sound as of someone treading cautiously the thick bed of moss, and the creaking of tiny twigs caused Richard Lambert to look up momentarily from the form of the girl whom he so dearly loved, and to peer beyond her into the weirdly illumined density of the wood.

Not twenty yards from where they were, a low wall divided the park itself from the wood beyond, which extended down to Acol village.  At an angle of the wall there was an iron gate, also the tumble-down pavilion, ivy-grown and desolate, with stone steps leading up to it, through the cracks of which weeds and moss sprouted up apace.

A man had just emerged from out the thicket and was standing now to the farther side of the gate looking straight at Lambert and at Sue, who stood in the full light of the moon.  A broad-brimmed hat, such as cavaliers affected, cast a dark shadow over his face.

It was a mere outline only vaguely defined against the background of trees, but in that outline Lambert had already recognized the mysterious stranger who lodged in his brother’s cottage down in Acol.

The fixed intensity of the young man’s gaze caused Sue to turn and to look in the same direction.  She saw the stranger, who encountering two pairs of eyes fixed on him, raised his hat with a graceful flourish of the arm:  then, with a short ironical laugh, went his way, and was once more lost in the gloom.

The girl instinctively made a movement as if to follow him, whilst a quickly smothered cry—­half of joy and half of fear—­escaped her lips.  She checked the movement as well as the cry, but not before Richard Lambert had perceived both.

With the perception came the awful, overwhelming certitude.

“That adventurer!” he exclaimed involuntarily.  “Oh my God!”

But she looked him full in the face, and threw back her head with a gesture of pride and of wrath.

“Master Lambert,” she said haughtily, “methinks ’twere needless to remind you that—­since I inadvertently revealed my most cherished secret to you—­it were unworthy a man of honor to betray it to any one.”