both stillness and darkness felt companionable, in harmony with the starlit dimness of the man’s mind.  His soul was having its adventure while mystery filled the outer air.  He walked on, wrapped in the nebulous fantasies which passed with him for thought, heedless, as he always was, of the flight of time.  Once he halted by the edge of the pond, and, sitting on a bench, lit and smoked his pipe until the cold forced him to rise.  With an instinctive desire to hear some earthly sound, he picked up a stone and threw it into the water.  He shivered at the ghostly splash and moved away, himself an ineffectual ghost wandering aimlessly in the night.

The Vicar’s lamp had been extinguished long ago.  A faint breeze sprang up.  The star sank lower in the sky.  Suddenly, as he turned back from the road to cross the common for the hundredth time, he became aware that he was not alone.  Footsteps rather felt than heard were in front of him.  He pressed forward and peered through the darkness, and finally made out a dim form some thirty yards away.  Idly he followed and soon recognized the figure as that of a woman hurrying fast.  Why a woman should be crossing Nunsmere Common at four o’clock in the morning passed his power of conjecture.  She was going neither to nor from the doctor, whose house lay behind the vicarage on the right.  All at once her objective became clear to him.  He thought of the splash of the stone.  She was making straight for the pond.  He hastened his pace, came up within a few yards of her and then stopped dead.  It was Emmy.  He recognized the zibeline toque and coat edged with the same fur which she often wore.  She carried something in her hand, he could not tell what.

She went on, unconscious of his nearness.  He followed her, horror-stricken.  Emmy, a new Ophelia, was about to seek a watery grave for herself and her love sorrow.  Again came the problem which in moments of emergency Septimus had never learned to solve.  What should he do?  Across the agony of his mind shot a feeling of horrible indelicacy in thrusting himself upon a woman at such a moment.  He was half tempted to turn back and leave her to the sanctity of her grief.  But again the splash echoed in his ears and again he shivered.  The water was so black and cold.  And what could he say to Zora?  The thought lashed his pace to sudden swiftness and Emmy turned with a little scream of fear.

“Who are you?”

“It’s I, Septimus,” he stammered, taking hold of his cap.  “For God’s sake, don’t do it.”

“I shall.  Go away.  How dare you spy on me?”

She stood and faced him, and her features were just discernible in the dim starlight.  Anger rang in her voice.  She stamped her foot.

“How dare you?”

“I haven’t been spying on you,” he explained.  “I only recognized you a couple of minutes ago.  I was walking about—­taking a stroll before breakfast, you know.”

“Oh!” she said, stonily.