Chance

After telling me that much Fyne sat helpless in unconclusive agony. Going

to bed was out of the question--neither could any steps be taken just

then. What to do with himself he did not know!

I asked him if this was the same young lady I saw a day or two before I

went to town? He really could not remember. Was she a girl with dark

hair and blue eyes? I asked further. He really couldn't tell what

colour her eyes were. He was very unobservant except as to the

peculiarities of footpaths, on which he was an authority.

I thought with amazement and some admiration that Mrs. Fyne's young

disciples were to her husband's gravity no more than evanescent shadows.

However, with but little hesitation Fyne ventured to affirm that--yes,

her hair was of some dark shade.

"We had a good deal to do with that girl first and last," he explained

solemnly; then getting up as if moved by a spring he snatched his cap off

the table. "She may be back in the cottage," he cried in his bass voice.

I followed him out on the road.

It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,

crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of

the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid

revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies.

Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart;

and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran

back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit

before the hosts of heaven, on a shadowy earth, about a transient,

phantom-like girl, seemed too ridiculous to associate with. On the other

hand there was something fascinating in the very absurdity. He cut along

in his best pedestrian style and I found myself let in for a spell of

severe exercise at eleven o'clock at night.

In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the vast

obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was like a

bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer. Inside, at the

table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs. Fyne sitting with folded arms and not

a hair of her head out of place. She looked exactly like a governess who

had put the children to bed; and her manner to me was just the neutral

manner of a governess. To her husband, too, for that matter.

Fyne told her that I was fully informed. Not a muscle of her ruddy

smooth handsome face moved. She had schooled herself into that sort of

thing. Having seen two successive wives of the delicate poet chivied and

worried into their graves, she had adopted that cool, detached manner to

meet her gifted father's outbreaks of selfish temper. It had now become

a second nature. I suppose she was always like that; even in the very

hour of elopement with Fyne. That transaction when one remembered it in

her presence acquired a quaintly marvellous aspect to one's imagination.

But somehow her self-possession matched very well little Fyne's

invariable solemnity.