Knowing my weakness and her great beauty, I had up to that moment studiously refrained from allowing so much as a wandering glance to rest on her; but I could not avoid looking at her now, and I remember that her eyes, bright and pitiful and beseeching, "her bosom's gentle neighbourhood," and the very consciousness of her presence as she stood before me, set my heart beating so wildly, that it was all I could do to refrain from taking her in my arms then and there, and telling her (forgive the profanation of a holy word) that I "loved" her. The virtuous determination to be on our guard against some besetting sin or constitutional failing comes to us generally, _not_ during the moment of temptation, when we are most in need of such a moral reminder, but _after_ the event, and when the determination is too late; but on this occasion I heard the inward monitor speak out a timely warning, and that with no uncertain tongue. By a great effort I nerved myself to my accustomed control, and though I knew Dorothy would think me churlish and cruel, I told her coldly that she had better go downstairs and wait the return of her mother. The words had scarcely time to pass my lips (I doubt, indeed, if she could have heard them), before they were lost in a terrific thunder-peal, following almost instantaneously upon a blinding flash of lightning. It had been better for both of us, as I have often since thought, if that flash had struck us dead as we stood there; for, with one cry of passion and fear, and calling me by my name--my Christian name--in a tone that none could misinterpret, Dorothy flung her arms around me, and the next moment I found myself pressing her to my heart with a fierce and almost savage exultation, and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses, that I loved her. Almost immediately afterwards we heard the opening of doors, which indicated her mother's home-coming, but not before Dorothy had time to tell me in return that she too loved me, and had always done so. And then she slipped from my arms, and tripped away with tumbled hair and flaming cheeks to join her mother, turning as she reached the door to look back with a shy smile and to say--innocently and unsuspectingly enough as I knew well--that the room directly over mine was her own, and that she often lay awake at night listening to my restless pacing to and fro, and wondering what could keep me up so late.