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24 And so she left him on the arbour steps—a pillar of vain and gloomy passion— indistinct in the starlight, but quivering again—all six feet and fifteen stone of him—with the grievous burden of his stubborn love.

CHAPTER IV

THE OLD LOVE

garden was the ordinary narrow one, but with top-heavy additions beyond and behind its neighbour on either side. And the arbour was (so to speak) in the bottle’s neck: there was no getting to the meadow without passing within a yard or two of its rustic portal.

There was, however, a shallow shrubbery down either wall of the original garden; and when Daintree had been alone about a minute, the laurels on his left began a risky rustle in the still evening air. Luckily, he was already in too deep a contemplation of his last and angriest wound to hear aught but the girl’s voice and his own still ringing through the arbour. But as for Claire, one moment she held her breath in horrid certainty that he had heard; in another she was satisfied that he had not; and had forgotten his existence the next. Indeed, by the time she looked upon the meadow, asleep beneath its soft grey coverlet of dew, the wide world contained but one live man, and he was at the gate upon the farther side.

Yet was he? Round the meadow ran a gravel path, upon which she thought her feet pattered loud enough for all the world to hear. Then she dropped the key in reaching it from its accustomed crevice and it rang upon