was there watching; it seemed to her nothing unclean could live in the
white light that permeated the very air of the room. Overcome for a
moment by the strength of her own emotions, she sat on the bed and
buried her face in her hands. As she looked at herself in the glass
before leaving the room she smiled for pleasure that she was unpowdered
and unrouged, not pausing, in her exalted mood, to wonder whether she
would have faced the daylight so. It was a better, an honester,
Blanche, transmuted by happiness, that crept down the stairs, through
the small garden and across the road into the field. He was awaiting her
by the hedge.

"How late you are!" he said, not reproachfully, but in relief that she
should have come at all. "I thought you must have changed your mind. Do
you know it is past eleven?"

"Have I been as long as that?" Blanche hugged herself to think that she
had been so genuinely wrapped in dreams as to let so much time slip by
unheeded. Together they went down the moonlit field, where the arishmows
seemed like the pavilions of a long-dead Arthurian host conjured up by
some magician's spells. In the last field before the moor Ishmael pulled
the corn out lavishly as a throne for her and installed her on it.

"You look like the spirit of harvest sitting there on your golden
throne," he told her, and, leaning back against the rustling stook, she
smiled mysteriously at him, all the glamour of the moonlight and her own
womanhood in her half-shut eyes.

"Blanche ...!"

He was kneeling beside her, his hands on her shoulders. Her eyelids