Eleanor looked up with strained eyes.
'It must be Mr.Manisty,' said Lucy hurriedly.

'He was out when I came through the glass passage.

The doors were all open, and his lamp burning.' I am nearly sure that I heard him unbar the front door.

I must wait now till he is gone.' They waited--Eleanor staring into the darkness of the room--till there had been much opening and shutting of doors, and all was quiet again.
Then the two women clung to each other in a strange and pitiful embrace--offered with passion on Lucy's side, accepted with a miserable shame on Eleanor's--and Lucy slipped away.
'He was out ?--in the garden ?' said Eleanor to herself bewildered.

And with those questions on her lips, and a mingled remorse and fever in her blood, she lay sleepless waiting for the morning.
* * * * * Manisty indeed had also been under the night, bathing passion and doubt in its cool purity.
Again and again had he wandered up and down the terrace in the starlight, proving and examining his own heart, raised by the growth of love to a more manly and more noble temper than had been his for years.
What was in his way?
His conduct towards his cousin?
He divined what seemed to him the scruple in the girl's sensitive and tender mind.