few months before. It was lighted now, and its lights attracted his attention.
"It's a brighter-looking place than it was then," he said. He never afterward could exactly recall how it was that at this moment he started, turned, and for a breath's space came to a full stop.
He had passed out of the shadow of the high boundary wall into the broad moonlight which flooded the gate-way. The iron gates were open, and a white figure stood in the light the figure of a tall young woman who did not move.
He was so near that her dress almost touched him. In another moment he was hurrying along the road again, not having spoken, and scarcely understanding the momentary shock he had received.
"That," he said to himself,"—that was she!"
When he reached home and opened the door of the little parlor, Christian Murdoch was sitting alone by the dying fire in the grate. She turned and looked at him.
"Something," she said, "has happened to you. What is it?"
"I don't know," he answered, "that anything has happened to me—anything of importance."
She turned to the fire again and sat gazing at it, rubbing the back of one hand slowly with the palm of the other, as it lay on her knee.
"Something has happened to me," she said. "To-day I have seen some one I know."
"Some one you know?" he echoed. "Here?"
She nodded her head.
"Some one I know," she repeated, "though I do not know her name. I should like to know it."
"Her name," he said. "Then it is a woman?"
