"The train is coming," I warned him. "_She_ is coming! _À la bonne heure!_" he cried, and was off on a run, and whistled a car that was going up Main Street to the natatorium; and I knew that in ten minutes he would be reveling in the plunge, while I should be making the best of this beautiful crisis of his inventing to Miss Comyn. * * * * * My dear, they are the prettiest pair! Providence, no doubt, designed them for each other, if he had not made this unpardonable break. She has a spirit of her own, has Miss Kitty, and if she cried up-stairs alone with me,--tears of anger and mortification, it struck me, rather than of heart-grief,--I will venture she shed no tears before him. As Mr. Michael Harshaw did not arrive, we gave Mr. Cecil his opportunity, as promised, of speech with his victim and judge. He talked to her in the little sitting-room after dinner--as long as she would listen to him, apparently. We heard her come flying out with a sort of passionate suddenness, as if she had literally run away from his words. But he had followed her, and for an instant I saw them together in the hall. His poor young face was literally burning; perhaps it was only sunburn, but I fancied she had been giving him a metaphorical drubbing--"ragging," as Tom would call it--worse than Lady Anne gave Richard. She was still in a fine Shakespearean temper when I carried her off up-stairs. Reserves were impossible between us; her right to any privacy in her own affairs had been given away from the start; that was one of the pleasing features of the situation. "_Marry_ him! marry _him_!" she cried. "That impertinent, meddlesome boy! That false, dishonorable"-- "Go slow, dear," I said. "I don't think he's quite so bad as that." "And what do I want with _him_! And what do you think he tells me, Mrs. Daly? And whether there's any truth in him, how do I know? He declares it was not Michael Harshaw who sent for me at all! The message, all the messages, were from him. In that case I have been decoyed over here to marry a man who not only never asked me to come, but who stood by and let me be hoaxed in this shameful way, and now leaves me to be persecuted by this one's ridiculous offers of marriage,--as if I belonged to all or any of the Harshaws, whichever one came first! Michael may not even know that I am here," she added in a lower key. "If Cecil Harshaw was capable of doing what he has done, by his own confession, it would be little more to intercept my answers to his forgeries." That was true, I said. It was quite possible the young man lied. She would, of course, give Mr. Michael Harshaw a chance to tell _his_ story. "I cannot believe," said the distracted girl, "that Michael would lend himself, even passively, to such an abominable trick. Could any one believe it--of his worst enemy!" Impossible, I agreed. She must believe nothing till she had heard from her lover.