Summoning all his courage, he once more approached the dead woman's body. He meant to throw it down the ravine, where chance might hide it. With a sickening feeling of loathing he stooped and raised it in his arms. Bah? As he did so something still warm ran over his hand. He dropped the body with a suppressed cry; it was Elsie's blood, and when he remembered this, it added new horror to his soul. But it must be done. With a great effort he once more bent down. He pulled it along this time--this lifeless thing he feared to touch. He dragged it to the edge of the ravine; he rolled it over the sharp descent. He heard it fall, then stop. He thought it had found a resting place. But suddenly the crash of a branch giving way fell on his ears. Again came a ghastly fall, then another, then a third, and then all was still. Henderson stood listening, spellbound with fear and horror. Great drops of moisture fell from his forehead, his very hair seemed to bristle with affright. Then after a time of unbroken silence, he slightly recovered himself. He sought for, and found, the revolver he had laid on the grass. This he flung down the ravine after the dead woman, and having done this he turned and fled from the spot with the black curse of murder on his soul. CHAPTER VIII. THE DEW ON THE GRASS. When people have been very happy one day, they naturally wish to be happy another. John Temple and May Churchill had been very happy collecting the ferns in the Dene, and before they parted John expressed a wish that this pleasure might be repeated. "We have had a charming afternoon, have we not, Miss Churchill?" he said, when May stopped at a short distance from her home and suggested that here they had better part. "Yes, I think we have," answered May, half-demurely, half-coquettishly. "I don't think, I'm sure," smiled John. "And an idea has just struck me, how lovely that place, Fern Dene, would be in the early morning, when the dew is on the grass?" "How romantic you are, Mr. Temple!" "I was, but the weight of my years has crushed it all out of me." "You do not look very old. How old are you, really?" "I am thirty, but I feel forty." "Thirty," repeated May, with a little laugh. "Just ten years older than I am!" "Oh, that decade, what I would give to forget it," said John Temple, half-seriously. "To go back to my lost youth; to be like you--" May shrugged her pretty shoulders. "But I shall get old, too," she smiled. "And cease to be the Mayflower," said John, with a genuine sigh. "Ah, that is very sad." Again May Churchill laughed. She stood there a picture of youth and beauty; a girl in the prime of her girlhood, and conscious perhaps that John Temple's gray eyes were fixed admiringly on her lovely face. "Yes," he repeated, "that will really be very sad. Age makes no matter to ordinary-looking people, you know, but to a flower--" "When shall I begin to wither?" asked May, archly.