“Oh, one always sighs for the past! How can one help feeling sorry that it should be gone--so much of our lives and of ourselves gone for ever?” “Oh, but when the future is so fair, when the present is so happy, there should be no more sighing. It is an offence against the Great Father of all, who has been so good to us.” She did not answer, and they remained silent for some minutes, she seated on a bank covered with heather and wild flowers; he stretched on the short, sweet turf at her feet. The heather had not begun to show its purple bloom, but there was the gold of the gorse, and the brightness of innumerable wild flowers around and about them as they basked in the sunshine. “Dearest, do you believe in dreams?” Disney asked suddenly. “Sometimes--not much--dreams are often dreadful,” she answered, with a startled air. “I don’t believe in them a bit,” he said, lifting himself into a sitting position, and addressing himself to her with increasing earnestness, “not now that I have you here safe within reach of my hand--so,” taking her hand in his, and keeping it clasped in both his own; “but I had a dream about you in Burmah, which kept me in a fever of anxiety for nearly a month. I should have telegraphed to ask if all was right with you, only I told myself that if anything was wrong Tabitha would instantly telegraph to me. I made her promise that before I left England. It was almost my last injunction. And to think that she left you half a year ago, and that anything might have happened to you after that, and that there was no one--no one----” “But, you see, I am quite safe. There was no bad news to send you. Besides, if I had been ill, or anything had gone wrong, there was Mrs. Baynham. She has been like a mother to me. I am so sorry you feel vexed about Tabitha’s leaving me.” “Doubly vexed, dear, because you left me in ignorance of the fact.” “Pray don’t be angry with me, Martin, so soon,” she pleaded meekly. “Angry, no. I am not angry. I don’t know how to be angry with you, Isola; but I can’t help being distressed. However, let the past be past. I shall never leave you to the care of strangers again till I die.” Her only answer was to bend her head down to kiss the hands that clasped her own. “Tell me about your dream,” she said, after a pause, with her forehead still resting on his hands, and her face hidden. “Was it something very awful?”