"Mervyn," she said, when five minutes after, their lips met in a long kiss; "I have come for you. See how I love you, to do this thing which might ruin any poor girl's reputation. You have done wrong, my poor boy, very wrong; but so have many of the others who are so saintly. And why should you stay to be prayed over by them--by Alicia Edwards too! I will not have it! There will be no more _me_ if you stop, Mervyn. Come now with me to Blackborough, the waggonette is waiting up the road at the bridge; we can catch the three o'clock mail at Llanilo. If you come, Mervyn, I will marry you in three days at the registrar's office." "But," he gasped, half-drunk with her kisses, half-stunned by his remembrances. She stamped her foot. "You must decide. I cannot stop here all night, some one may come. Oh! Mervyn! Mervyn! do you not feel that you were not made for this narrow life? You--you are no worse than others, and you have brains. You can make money if you will in the world, but not here." Those two hours of blessed sleep! How they had obliterated that stress of over-wrought emotion, and how his young blood leapt up in assent. But Morris---- Her instinct was keen--"And see you, Mervyn, it will be better for Morris, too! If you go, why should he speak? What is confession without a culprit? Come! you can write to him from Blackborough. Come--or there is no more me for you from to-night." When Morris Pugh returned from the temple that is made without hands an hour later, the house lay very still in the moonlight. He paused at his brother's door to listen. There was no sound. So he passed on to his own room, took his father's Bible, his mother's picture, the few odd pounds he had in the house, and so passed downstairs again to the writing-table in the study, where he had thought out so many sermons, so many appeals to his wandering flock. But it was neither a sermon nor an appeal which he set down on paper and left lying where Mervyn would see it next morning. Rather was it a confession, for this is how it ran:-- "Wisdom has come to me among the eternal hills, brother. Go your way. Be one of the saints in light. I will go mine since I cannot stay and remain silent. May God in His mercy preserve you always from the judgment of men, and give you His Grace." It lay there all night with the moonlight shining on it. Then the moonbeams faded and the greyness of the false dawn found it lying there still. But the breath of the real dawn winning its way through the door opened by the housekeeper who came to set the room in order, tilted it into the waste-paper basket, whence swiftly it made its way to the fire by the hands of tidiness. Thus Mervyn would have had no chance of seeing it, even if he had been there. But he was not. CHAPTER XIX Peter Ramsay put down the letter with a low whistle and stood staring at his half-packed portmanteau. Then he took up the letter again and re-read it.