consciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself and
Darrow. To the aerial listener her words sounded flat and
colourless, but to the self within the ring each one beat
with a separate heart.

It was the day after Darrow's arrival, and he had come down
early, drawn by the sweetness of the light on the lawns and
gardens below his window. Anna had heard the echo of his
step on the stairs, his pause in the stone- flagged hall,
his voice as he asked a servant where to find her. She was
at the end of the house, in the brown-panelled sitting-room
which she frequented at that season because it caught the
sunlight first and kept it longest. She stood near the
window, in the pale band of brightness, arranging some
salmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelain bowl. Every
sensation of touch and sight was thrice-alive in her. The
grey- green fur of the geranium leaves caressed her fingers
and the sunlight wavering across the irregular surface of
the old parquet floor made it seem as bright and shifting as
the brown bed of a stream.

Darrow stood framed in the door-way of the farthest drawing-
room, a light-grey figure against the black and white
flagging of the hall; then he began to move toward her down
the empty pale-panelled vista, crossing one after another
the long reflections which a projecting cabinet or screen
cast here and there upon the shining floors.

As he drew nearer, his figure was suddenly displaced by that
of her husband, whom, from the same point, she had so often