side, he had expected her to fall at once, happily, if not gratefully, into his arms; instead of which she stands glaring at him like a young pythoness, and reiterating "Never!"

The assumption of this position in the girl supposed to be breaking her heart for love of him somewhat alters the aspect of affairs. Guy naturally grows warmer in the face of opposition.

"My dear child," he says, not attempting to touch her now, "pray forgive me. I was too abrupt. I fancied that you liked me a little, and

"And you came to ask me just out of pity!" cries the girl, excitedly.

"Indeed no," he answers, a little shocked at this coarse way of putting it.

"Indeed yes!" she retorts, passionately. "He has told you, I know, and it was mean and cruel of him."

Guy, being about as clever at subterfuge as most straightforward Englishmen,

is rather at a disadvantage. A lie sticks in his throat, and nothing short of it is required to calm the girl's excitement. "My dear child-" he protests; but she interrupts him.

"Do you

think I do not know?

Cannot

I read it in your face? If he had not told

you, would you

have come into the room smiling and looking quite sure of what I should answer when you did me the honour to ask me ?"

Never before has Dolores been SO passionately excited. She feels degraded in her own eyes, and it makes her bitter against the man who she feels has degraded her, dearly though she loves him.

"What a clumsy brute I am!" Guy thinks to himself. "Of course I ought not to have blundered at it in that way-no wonder she resents it, poor little thing;" but her behaviour was the effect of making him more solicitous about the prize he had besought in so cavalier a fashion.

"Have I offended you ?" he asks rather humbly, not being skilled in the treatment

of wayward young women.

"Offended me !" with a touch of scorn. "Oh! Sir Guy, you do me too much honour, only" (her voice breaking suddenly)—“ only, unfortunately, I know that you had an interview with Captain Etherege to-day, when he told you that-that I loved you" (her face dyed with hot shame), "and so out of pity-out of pity, you ask me to be your wife."

"But I assure you," pleads Guy.

"Else" (interrupting him passionately) -"else why have you been all these months without coming to see if I was alive or dead, without writing me one line, without thinking of me once; and now to-day, to-day you come suddenly with a face that says, 'I have but to hold out my arms, and she will rush into them.""

She stands before him with her lovely eyes dilated, her mouth quivering, every

line and curve of her delicate figure shaking with intense emotion; her utterance is rapid, and tinged by the faintest foreign accent.

Guy had come coolly to the wooing, in a composed after-dinner frame of mind-he was utterly unprepared for any scene of this kind-he had come with the intention of saying in so many words,

"My dear child, I am a disappointed man, tired of the world, tired of myself, tired of everything. I have no romantic love to give you; no doubt in time I shall be very fond of you; you are a very dear little thing, and I hope you will be content to take me as I am."

His ideas on this subject undergo some modification. Such a style of wooing hardly seems suited to the present emergency, and, manlike, or perhaps rather human-like, he begins to set a little more store by the thing that is not so easy to win as he imagined.

151

"INDER

CHAPTER IX.

GOOD-BYE!

NDEED I do love you, Dolores, awfully !" says the young man, making emphatic use of the word to which the present generation have by common consent given a new and utterly inappropriate signification.

As he speaks, he feels quite certain that what he says is true. She, standing before him there, looks so sweet and fair, so altogether desirable, it is no longer a hard task to frame words loving enough to woo her.

She is not shrewd, nor clever, nor penetrating, but she can hear the altered ring