consenting, once again she turns her head. The hotels are long passed. If he is still following, it is she whom he is following. And lo! twenty yards behind her, there he is, stepping through the moonlight!

She gives a low, excited laugh. Well, they have both had their will then he has not walked home with her; she has not walked home alone. It is a compromise. Again she looks up to the heavens. What a lovely, lovely vault! What seed-pearl of constellations! What great planet

diamonds!

The clocks have just begun to strike midnight; the city's innumerous clocks, cathedral, college, church; the booming bell, the sharp strike, the melodious chime! How nobly their loud wedded harmony floods the night! And is there one of the gardens-she has reached the suburb of villas and gardens by this time-that has not contributed the breath of its gillyflowers to make the boon air so sweet?

She walks on with her strong elastic tread. After all, it is good to be young:

to have a fine ear for sound; a nostril sensitive to fragrance; and the consciousness that behind you there is one protecting you where there is nothing to be protected from -guarding you where there is nothing to be guarded against.

She has reached her own gate, and at it halts, her hand upon the latch. Here surely, under the ægis of her own roof-tree —here, where that twinkling night-light shows the exact spot where her husband is addressing himself to his slumbers-she may abate a little of her rigidity.

Seeing her arrived, he too has halted; nor is it until by a faint motion of her hand she gives him leave to approach, that he ventures to draw near her.

"Thank you!" she says with a smile, to which it is perhaps the moonlight that lends its quivering uncertainty; "but it was not necessary.

He neither disclaims nor accepts her acknowledgments. Gravely he unfastens the iron gate for her; while above his gold head the laburnum droops her gold

curls. The moon has taken their colour out of both, and substituted her own. Is he then still going to say nothing? But as she passes through, he speaks:

"I-I-am not leaving Oxbridge tomorrow. I shall be in Oxbridge all to

"Shall you?" she says faintly.

"I have not done anything to forfeit your friendship, have I?" he asks, while in the moonlight she sees his right hand tighten its nervous clasp on one of the spiked iron uprights of the gate.

She is quite silent.

"Have I?" he repeats, in a tone as of one who, though patient, will not go without his answer. (Is truth always the best to be spoken? Then let it be spoken !)

"Nothing!"

"Is there then any reason why I should not come and see you to-morrow?"

Silence again; her look wandering undecidedly over her flower-bed.

"Is there ?"

Her eye has caught the Professor's night-light again—that ill-favoured Jacko'-Lantern that is to dance for ever across the morass of her life.

"None!" she answers firmly; and with that firm "None!" she leaves him.

11

CHAPTER IV.

E was not far wrong," says Sarah dispassionately, "though I am afraid that it was scarcely in

a brotherly spirit that he said it; I am eminently well able to take care of myself!"

It is next morning, and the girls are beginning the day with a preliminary saunter round the narrow bounds of the little garden, and the newly-mown tennisground. They are very small bounds, but within them is room for undried dew; for a blackbird with a voice a hundred times. bigger than its body; for a guelder rose, a fine broom-bush, and a short-lived lilac. What more would you have? Beneath