He left the professor to attend to some affairs in town, and when he got out to the University he found that Frances was lazily asleep. He sent to ask if she would take a ride, and waited with no show of impatience until she came running down the stair, habited and gloved. "A ride!" she called. "How delightful! If I had had Starlight, I should not have been so lazy, but father was out with you. Has he any new suggestions?" "Not one!" Montague smiled, and in the darkened room, Frances did not notice how white he was. "We had better hurry!" she said, "or we will lose the sunset." Montague opened the door as she spoke. The shadows of the maples stretched long across the quadrangle, and the corridor and houses across the way shimmered in the low and golden sunlight. The vine about the pillar stretched brave new tendrils upward, and proudly waved its glossy leaves. Frances, with quick sight for each beauty of the outside world and ready speech of field and flower and wayside growth and bloom, kept her own blithe atmosphere about her, as they rode. Far out where the road climbed high, she drew rein. They were in time for the sunset glory. It flooded the valley below them with mystic light, kindled the skies beyond the hill-tops with scarlet fires, against which the peaks loomed dark, and sent banners of trailing clouds far over the zenith. With hands clasped upon the pommel, she watched the scene with delighted eyes. Montague pulled his horse close to hers, and leaned over, his hand on Starlight's mane. So, with the golden light of the sun streaming around her, he could see every line of her face. What he had to say to her he had determined to say shortly, bravely, with no embroidery of verbiage. "Frances," he said as he watched her intently, "I heard to-day that Lawson's wife was dead; did you know it?" Frances straightened in her saddle as if she had been struck. Her eyes, which had been dark and dreamy, flashed. "Yes," she said shortly, "I knew it!" "Does it make any difference with you?" "How dare you?" "It's not a question of daring," he said simply, "but of truth. You remember last winter--" he went on mercilessly. Frances pulled up her loosened reins. "We had better turn here," she said coldly. But Montague never moved his hand. "'Turn here'?" He spoke of the way of their love and she read his hidden meaning aright. "_Perhaps_, but not now. You know, I know that you know, that I value your own happiness beyond my own. I have thought--but maybe your happiness does not lie with me, Frances?" She was silent, a curve on her lips he had never seen and did not like to see. "Are you sure?" he persisted. "No!" she flashed, "I am sure of nothing, certainly of nothing a man will say or do!" "It is no time for such words," said Montague; "you know I love you, I could never tell you how much! Day by day I might show you, prove to you--