"Talking is better for all sorts of things," said my father, and wanted to know if the weather had been as hot in London as it had been in Burnmore.
Mary's note was in pencil, scribbled hastily. I was to wait after eleven that night near the great rose bushes behind the pavilion. Long before eleven I was there, on a seat in a thick shadow looking across great lakes of moonlight towards the phantom statuary of the Italianate garden and the dark laurels that partly masked the house. I waited nearly an hour, an hour of stillness and small creepings and cheepings and goings to and fro among the branches.
In the bushes near by me a little green glow-worm shared my vigil.
And then, wrapped about in a dark velvet cloak, still in her white dinner dress, with shining, gleaming, glancing stones about her dear throat, warm and wonderful and glowing and daring, Mary came flitting out of the shadows to me.
"My dear," she whispered, panting and withdrawing a little from our first passionate embrace, "Oh my dear!... How did I come? Twice before, when I was a girl, I got out this way. By the corner of the conservatory and down the laundry wall. You can't see from here, but it's easy--easy. There's a tree that helps. And now I have come that way to you. _You!..._
"Oh! love me, my Stephen, love me, dear. Love me as if we were never to love again. Am I beautiful, my dear? Am I beautiful in the moonlight? Tell me!...
"Perhaps this is the night of our lives, dear! Perhaps never again will you and I be happy!...
"But the wonder, dear, the beauty! Isn't it still? It's as if nothing really stood solid and dry. As if everything floated....
"Everyone in all the world has gone to sleep to-night and left the world to us. Come! Come this way and peep at the house, there. Stoop--under the branches. See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and its eyes shut. One window is open, _my_ little window, Stephen! but that is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black.
"Along here a little further is night-stock. Now--Now! Sniff, Stephen! Sniff! The scent of it! It lies--like a bank of scented air.... And Stephen, there! Look!... A star--a star without a sound, falling out of the blue! It's gone!"