"Florence, you still awake, when all the world is sleeping?"

Her name falling from his lips touches a chord in her breast, and wakes
her to passionate life.

"You too," she says in a whisper that reaches his strained ears. There
seems to her a subtle joy in the thought that they two of all the
household are awake, are here talking together alone in the pale light
of the moon.

Yet she is wrong in imagining that no others are up in the house, as his
next words tell her.

"It is not a matter of wonder in my case," he responds; "a few fellows
are still in the smoking-room. It is early, you know--not yet three. But
you--why are you keeping a lonely vigil like this?"

"The moon tempted me to the window," answers Florence. "See how calm
she looks riding majestically up there. See"--stretching out her bare
white arm until the beams fall full upon it, and seem to change it to
purest marble--"does it not make one feel as if all the world were being
bathed in its subdued glow?"

A pale tremulous smile widens her lips. Sir Adrian, plucking a tall pale
lily growing near him, flings it upward with such an eager aim that it
alights upon her window-sill. She sees it. Her fingers close upon it.

"Fit emblem of its possessor," says Adrian softly, and rather
unsteadily. "Do you know of what you remind me, sitting there in your
white robes? A medieval saint cut in stone--a pure angel, too good, too