I thought with amazement and some admiration that Mrs. Fyne's young
disciples were to her husband's gravity no more than evanescent shadows.
However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that--yes,
her hair was of some dark shade.

"We had a good deal to do with that girl first and last," he explained
solemnly; then getting up as if moved by a spring he snatched his cap off
the table. "She may be back in the cottage," he cried in his bass voice.
I followed him out on the road.

It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of
the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid
revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies.
Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart;
and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran
back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit
before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient,
phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the other
hand there was something fascinating in the very absurdity. He cut along
in his best pedestrian style and I found myself let in for a spell of
severe exercise at eleven o'clock at night.

In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the vast
obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was like a
bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer. Inside, at the
table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs. Fyne sitting with folded arms and not
a hair of her head out of place. She looked exactly like a governess who
had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just the neutral