"Two years wouldn't seem like two minutes, if we come together." "Two minutes--two ages! Lucian, I might say fifty things and put you off, and leave it doubtful. But I'll only say one, and I surely know it. I don't love you now." "You love some other man?" "No, I don't, but,"--with a sudden outburst, "you killed my love for you, dead, and it won't come to life again. It's no good--no good--for I shall never have it again--never!" "I--surely you cannot tell. I will wait--let me come again. I had to let you know I was yours--but on your side--when I knew you had been true to me, and that I wronged you--that you really loved me, I never thought it possible your love could change." "Well, I have changed," said Amethyst. "It is all gone by, I can't go back. I had to turn into a different person, and I can't put back the clock. I shouldn't fall in love with you, if I met you now. But I wish I had died when I did love you." She darted back into the shelter of the lights and the crowd, and soon she saw Lucian and his friend bow to her mother and go. Sir Richard Grattan came up to her to say good-night. "May I come to-morrow?" he said, with meaning. Amethyst looked full at him, as if she were then and there appraising him, and making up her mind. Then, very slowly and distinctly, she said-- "_Yes_." No! Lucian was not her Romeo, and she was not to find her deliverance in the flood-tide of passion. A girl with weaker brain, or of less concentrated feeling, might have doubted and wondered, and tried to conjure up the old magic, but Amethyst was too clever and too intense for self-deception. Lucian was nothing to her but a handsome boy, and the love of her girlhood was gone for ever. She had left it behind her. CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. TEMPTED OF THE DEVIL. Una lay awake through the early part of the hot summer night, with her mind full of the crisis in Amethyst's fate. She was sad and anxious; all the sweetness of her life was owing to Amethyst's tenderness, and how long would the loving sister be left beside her? She could not guess at all what choice Amethyst would be impelled to make, what effect the sight of Lucian would have upon her. She had hardly seemed to heed the discovery that Sylvester Riddell was her lover too. Had she made up her mind to marry Sir Richard Grattan at all costs? Was not Oliver Carisbrooke more to her than she knew? Una believed that her own life had been shipwrecked for ever. She longed with all her heart to see Amethyst steer clear of the treacherous rocks in her way. She lay awake in the sultry air, listening till the sound of the expected step on the stairs made her heart throb till she was faint.