watching the stars light one by one, and the immense gray night
settle and broaden and widen from mountain-top to horizon. They
did not feel the necessity of making conversation. There was no
constraint in their silence now.

Gently, and a little at a time, Condy turned his head and looked
at Blix. There was just light enough to see. She was leaning
back in her chair, her hands fallen into her lap, her head back
and a little to one side. As usual, she was in black; but now it
was some sort of dinner-gown that left her arms and neck bare.
The line of the chin and the throat and the sweet round curve of
the shoulder had in it something indescribable--something that was
related to music, and that eluded speech. Her hair was nothing
more than a warm colored mist without form or outline. The sloe-
brown of her little eyes and the flush of her cheek were mere
inferences--like the faintest stars that are never visible when
looked at directly; and it seemed to him that there was disengaged
from her something for which there was no name; something that
appealed to a mysterious sixth sense--a sense that only stirred at
such quiet moments as this; something that was now a dim, sweet
radiance, now a faint aroma, and now again a mere essence, an
influence, an impression--nothing more. It seemed to him as if
her sweet, clean purity and womanliness took a form of its own
which his accustomed senses were too gross to perceive. Only a
certain vague tenderness in him went out to meet and receive this
impalpable presence; a tenderness not for her only, but for all
the good things of the world. Often he had experienced the same
feeling when listening to music. Her sweetness, her goodness,
appealed to what he guessed must be the noblest in him. And she
was only nineteen. Suddenly his heart swelled, the ache came to