do?--nothing to trouble us or compel us to labour? Without pain
shall we be conscious of health?--without sorrow shall we understand
joy?"

A sudden whiteness flooded the dark landscape, and a full moon
leaped to the edge of the receding cloud. Its rising had been veiled
in the drift of black woolly vapour, and its silver glare, sweeping
through the darkness flashed over the land with astonishing
abruptness. The man lifted his eyes.

"One would think that done for effect!" he said, half aloud--"If the
moon were the goddess Cynthia beloved of Endymion, as woman and
goddess in an impulse of vanity she would certainly have done that
for effect! As it is--"

Here he paused,--an instinctive feeling warned him that some one was
looking at him, and he turned his head quickly. On the slope of the
hill where Manella had lately stood, there was a figure, white as
the white moonlight itself, outlined delicately against the dark
background. It seemed to be poised on the earth like a bird just
lightly descended; in the stirless air its garments appeared closed
about it fold on fold like the petals of an unopened magnolia
flower. As he looked, it came gliding towards him with the floating
ease of an air bubble, and the strong radiance of the large moon
showed its woman's face, pale with the moonbeam pallor, and set in a
wave of hair that swept back from the brows and fell in a loosely
twisted coil like a shining snake stealthily losing itself in folds
of misty drapery. He rose to meet the advancing phantom.

"Entirely for effect!" he said, "Well planned and quite worthy of