Mrs. Hayward decided that she would walk home.
For what reason?—for no reason at all, so far as she was aware; only, apparently without knowing it, to help out the decisions of fate. There was a stream of other people going home, some of them walking too, as it was so lovely an evening. The air was the softest balm of summer, cool, the sun going down, soft shadows stealing over the sky, the river still lit with magical reflections—those reflections which are nothing, such stuff as dreams are made of, and yet more beautiful than anything in earth or heaven. The rose tints were in the atmosphere as well as the sky. When you turned a corner, the resistance of the soft air meeting you was as a caress—like the kiss with which one loving creature meets another as they pass upon their happy way. It was no longer spring indeed, but matured and full-blown summer, ready any morning, by a touch of north wind or early frost, to become autumn in a moment, but making the very best of her last radiant evening. The well-dressed crowd streamed out of the gates of Sir Samuel’s great house on the hill, and then separated, flowing in little rills of white and bright dresses, of pleasant voices and talk, upon their several ways. Till then, of course, they had all kept together. Afterwards the little accidents, the natural effect of unequal steps and different pace, so arranged it that the older pair dragged behind, having still some good-byes to make, and that the other two, who had fallen together without any intention, went on before.
Joyce was always shy, but she had never been embarrassed by the presence of Norman Bellendean. She had been able even to laugh with him when the gloom of her arrival in this new sphere, and of her severance from the old, was heaviest upon her. She had the reassuring consciousness that he knew all about her, and could not be in any way deceived. No need of fictions to account for her, nor apologies for her ignorance, were necessary with him.
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 And she gave him from the first that most flattering proof of preference by being at her ease with him, when she was so with no one else. But there was something in the air to-night which suggested embarrassment—something too familiar, over-sweet. Mrs. Hayward and the Colonel did not feel this. They said to each other that it was a lovely evening, and then they talked of their own concerns. Joyce was not like them—the rose-tinted vapours on the sky had got into her very soul.
‘Was there ever such a sunset?’ said Norman Bellendean. ‘And yet, Miss Joyce, you and I remember something better still,—the long, long lingering of the warm days——’
‘In summer,’ she said, with a little catching of her breath, ‘when you never could tell whether there was any night at all.’
‘And when the night was better than the day, if better could be, and morning and evening ran into each other.’
‘And it was all like paradise,’ said Joyce, chiming in. Their voices were full of emotion, though they were speaking only of such unexciting things as the atmosphere and the twilight—two safe subjects surely, if any subjects could be safe.
‘It is not like that,’ Joyce added, with a little reluctance; ‘but still the river when the last flash of the sun is upon it, and all the clouds hanging like roses upon the sky, and the water glimmering like a glass, and making everything double like the swan——’
Norman was one of the unread. He did not know what swan it was that floated ‘double, swan and shadow,’ for ever and ever, since that day the poet saw it: but he understood the scene and the little failure of breath in the enthusiasm of her description with which Joyce spoke.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was like that the other night—but there was a charm wanting.’
‘Oh,’ Joyce said, still breathless; and she added, with an impulse that was involuntary, beyond her power of control, not what she meant or wished to say— ‘When you were up the river—the other night—passing——’
Did she mean it as a reproach? He looked at her quickly. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is true I passed—the very lawn, the enchanted place—and looked and looked, but did not see you.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but I saw you, Captain Bellendean. I saw you go below the bridge steering. It was strange, among all the strange folk, and the boats coming and going, suddenly to see—a kent face.’
She laughed, in a curious embarrassed way, as if laughing at herself, yet with a rising colour, and eyes that did not turn to him,
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 rather avoided him. Norman had a sudden gleam of perception, and understood more or less the little fanciful shock which Joyce had received to see him pass.
‘You could not think it more strange than I did,’ he said, in an unconscious tone of self-defence, ‘nor half so disagreeable. To pass with people I cared nothing for, the same way that has become associated to me with—with—— And to look perhaps as if it were just the same whether it was they or—others.’
He began with self-defence, but ended with an inflection of half complaint and subdued indignation in his tone.
‘Indeed,’ said Joyce, startled, ‘I did not think——’
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you did not think about me at all, and I am a fool for supposing you did; but if you thought for a moment that it was any pleasure to me to be there, apart from all that had made it delightful——’
‘Oh,’ cried Joyce, in an anxious effort not to understand this inference which flooded all her veins with a sudden rush of indescribable celestial delight, ‘but the river was as bright as ever I saw it, and the sky like heaven; and why should you not be happy—with your friends?’
He had given her a sensation more exquisite than any she had ever known in all her life; and on her side she was giving him pain, and knew it, and was not ill-pleased to have it so. Such, as the old moralists would say, are the strange contradictions of human feeling! He turned upon her an aggrieved expostulating glance.
‘You think it was the same, whoever my companions might be? You don’t understand what it was to me to be bound to the oar like the galley slaves, to listen to all their inane nonsense and their jokes, when my heart was in—oh, a very different place.’
‘You have been all over the world, Captain Bellendean, you must remember so many other places—more beautiful than this.’
‘Do you think that is what I mean?’ he said quickly, in a tone almost of irritation. Joyce knew very well it was not what he meant. But she had to defend herself with the first weapons that came in her way.
‘Don’t you know,’ he said, after a pause, ‘that this has been such a summer as I never had before? I have been a great deal about the world, as you say. I have had many experiences: but never yet have I felt as I have felt this year. I never was romantic, nor had I much poetry in me. But I begin to think the poets are the fellows, after all, who understand best.’
‘That is true, I am sure,’ said Joyce in a subdued voice. She
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 was thankful to find something that she could say. She walked along mechanically by the Captain’s side, feeling as if she were floating in some vague enchantment, not able to pause or realise anything, not able to escape, carried along by the delicious soft air which was breathing within her being as well as without, a rapture that could not be explained.
‘I believe it is true—but I never thought so before. And the cause is that I never knew—you before,’ the Captain said.
Did the people know who were passing? could they see in the faces of those two walking—nay, floating by, surrounded by a golden mist—what was being said between them? A vague wonder stole into Joyce’s mind as she perceived dimly through that mist the face of a wayfarer going by. She herself but vaguely realised the meaning of the words. She understood their sentiment well enough,—felt it in that silent ecstasy that swept her along, but had no power to think or exercise her own faculties at all, only to let herself be carried on, and away.
‘You have been the enchantment to me,’ he said hurriedly; ‘and now it is almost over, and I shall have to go away. The charm will be gone from everything. I don’t know how I am to reconcile myself to the dull world and the long days—unless——’
‘Captain Bellendean——’ Joyce said faintly, hearing her own voice, as if it came from a long distance, feeling a vague necessity for a pause.
‘Unless I may—come back,’ he said. ‘I must go home and put things in order—but it need not be for very long—if I may come back?’
There was something vaguely defective in these words, she could not tell what. For that very reason they relieved her, because they were not what they might have been. She came to herself as if she had touched the earth after that vague swaying, floating, in realms above the earth, in the soft delicious air.
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you will come back. There is no reason for not coming back.’
He, it seemed, had not felt that touch of reality which had brought Joyce out of her rapture. He was confused and floating still. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘not to return merely to town or—but to come back to this moment, to those days. I have never known anything like them. They have opened a new world to me: Joyce——’
‘Captain Bellendean!’
‘I mean no familiarity—no want of respect; could you think
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 so? The name came out without intention—only because I say it over, and over—— Joyce—I may come back?’
Surely the passers-by must see! He had turned and was looking at her with pleading eyes; while she, with the red of the western sky in her face, with the mist in her eyes............