It was a sultry night. Not a breath of air was stirring. They had escaped from the crowd on the quays and were being rowed about the lake in a little boat gaily hung with Chinese lanterns. The glare fell on their faces, confusing their view, and making all dark objects around them invisible. Their eyes caught nothing but a phantasmagoria of coloured lights. The water swarmed with them. Scores of similarly illuminated craft darted hither and thither, crossed and recrossed each other on all sides, with the dazzling effect of myriads of fireflies. All around, fixed amid the moving lights, blazed the lamps on quays, bridges and jetties. Now and then, through a momentary vista, could be seen the gas devices on the fronts of the great hotels on the Quai du Mont Blanc. Now and then, too, they neared the looming hull of the great steamer, a mass of festoons of coloured lamps. The strains of the band on board broke through the roar of many voices, with a strange effect, and died away in the general hubbub as the steamer moved slowly off.

“I am glad I came,” said Katherine. “It was nice of you to think of this boat. It is fresher on the water.”

She was happy; he was by her side. The little canopy of lanterns above their heads seemed to draw them together, isolate them from the outer world. The lights whirled around her as in a dream. Raine too, for all his man’s lesser emotional impressibility, felt a slight exaltation, a continuance of the strange sense of the unreality of things. As the moments passed, this common mood grew in intensity.

They spoke of the incident of the dinner-table, but like other things it seemed to lose perspective. Meanwhile the old wizened boatman, apparently far away in the bows, rowed stolidly round and round within the basin formed by the quays and jetties.

“It is a mad story,” said Katherine. “Almost fantastic. What object had he? Was he a fiend, or a coward, or what?”

“Both,” said Raine. “With a soft sentimental heart. A fiend that is half a fool is ever the blackest of fiends. He is irresponsible for his own hell.”

“Are all men like that who make life a hell for women?”

“In a way. Men are blind to the consequences of their own actions. Apply the truism specially. Or else they see only their own paths before them. Sometimes men seem ‘a little brood.’ I often wonder how women can love them.”

“Do you? Would you include yourself?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“Do you think you could ever be cruel to a woman?”

“I could never lie to her, if you mean that. The woman who loves me will find me straight, however much of an inferior brute I might be otherwise.”

“Don’t,” said Katherine. “You frighten me—the suggestion—”

“But you asked me whether I could be cruel.”

“A woman’s thoughts and speech are never so intense as a man’s. You throw a lurid light on my words and I shrink from them. Forgive me. I know that you could be nothing but what was good and truehearted.”

Raine looked at her. Her face was delicate in its strength, very pure in its sadness.’ The dim light by which it was visible suggested infinite things beyond that could be revealed in a greater brightness. He felt wonderfully drawn to her.

“Men have been cruel to you. That is why you ask.”

“Ah no!” she said, turning away her head quickly. “I will never call men cruel. I have suffered. Who has not? The greatest suffering—it is the greatest suffering in life—that which comes between man and woman.”

“It is true,” replied Raine musingly. “As it can be the greatest joy. Once I could not bear to think of it, for the pain. It is strange—”

“What is strange?” asked Katherine in a low voice.

He was scarcely conscious how he had come to strike the chord of his own life. It seemed natural at the moment.

“It is strange how like a dream it all appears now; as if another than I—a bosom friend, whose secrets I shared—had gone through it.”

She put her hand lightly on his arm, and he felt the touch to his heart.

“Would you care for me to tell you? I should like to. It would seem a way of laying a ghost peacefully and reverently. It has never passed out of me yet—not even to my father.”

“Tell me,” murmured Katherine.

“Both are dead—twelve years ago.”

“Both?”

“Yes; mother and child. I was little else than a boy—an undergraduate. She was little else than a girl—yet she had been married—then deserted by her husband and utterly alone and friendless when I met her—in London. She was a dresser at a theatre—educated though, and refined far above her class. At first I helped her—then loved her—we couldn’t marry—she offered—at first I refused. But then—well, you can end it. We loved each other dearly. If she had lived, I should have been true to her till this day—I should have married her, for she would soon have become a widow. When the child was born, I was one-and-twenty—she nineteen. We were wildly, ecstatically happy. Three months afterwards the child caught diphtheria—she caught it too from the baby—first the little one died—then the mother died in my arms. I seemed to have lived all my life before I had entered upon it. It was a heavy burthen for a lad.”

“And since?” asked Katherine gently.

“I have shrunk morbidly from risking such torture a second time.”

“Yours is a nature to love altogether if it loves at all.”

“I reverence love too highly to treat it lightly,” he said. “Tell me,” he added, “do you think my punishment came upon me rightly? There are those that would. Are you one?”

“God forbid,” she replied in a low voice. “God forbid that I of all creatures should dare to judge others.”

The earnestness in her tone startled him. He caught a side-view of her face. It wore the same look of sadness as on the night they had seen “Denise” together in the winter. She had suffered. A great yearning pity for her rose in his heart.

“It is well that the past can be the past,” he said. “We live, and gather to ourselves fresh personalities. A little gradual change, a little daily hardening or softening, weakening or strengthening—and at the end of a few years we are different entities. Things become memories—reflections without life. That was why I said it was strange. Now all that time is only a vague memory, and it mingles with the far-off memory of my mother, who died when I was a tiny boy. And now I have put it to rest for ever—for it was a ghost until I knew you. Do you believe in idle fancies?”

“I live in a great many,” said Katherine.

“I fancied—that by telling you, I should be free to give myself up to a new, strange, wonderful world that I saw ready to open for me.”

“Could I ever say ‘I thank you’ for telling me?” replied Katherine. “I take all that you have said to my heart.”

There was a long silence. He put his hand down by her side and it rested upon hers. She made a movement to withdraw it, but his touch tightened into a clasp. She allowed it to remain, surrendering herself to the happiness. Each felt the subtle communion of spirit too precious to be broken by speech. The lantern-hung boats passed backwards and forwards. One party, just as they came abreas............