‘I’ll wager mother has been bemoaning the vices of the new dairymaid, and the ingratitude of the old one in going away to be married,’ said he. ‘That’s what sent you to sleep, wasn’t it, Daphne?’ ‘I was tired. We had such a long afternoon,’ she answered wearily. ‘The carriage has been waiting half an hour,’ said Madoline. ‘I think we had better put on our hats, and then say good-night.’ ‘Mr. Goring will drive home with you, of course,’ said Mrs. Turchill. ‘Yes; I am going to see them safe home, Mrs. Turchill,’ answered Gerald. ‘I am to stay at South Hill to-night, and hear Sir Vernon’s account of the Yeomanry dinner.’ Edgar, who had just been talking of eternal banishment, was longing to ask for the fourth seat in the landau. The walk home between midnight and morning would be delightful. ‘I should have liked to hear about the dinner,’ he began dubiously; and then meeting Gerald’s eye, quailed beneath its friendly ridicule, and said no more. He escorted Daphne to the carriage, helped to arrange her wraps with a steady hand, though his heart beat passionately all the time; and bade her good-night in so thoroughly cheery a voice, that she wondered a little to find how easily he had taken her rejection of him. ‘Poor dear Edgar!’ she said to herself as they drove along the shadowy Warwickshire lane, through the calm beauty of the summer night, ‘I daresay it was only an impulse of the moment—or perhaps it was the moon—that made him propose to me. Yet he seemed awfully in earnest, and I was afraid I might have offended him by laughing. But, after being devoted to Lina, and making me the confidante of his grief, it was certainly rather impertinent to offer himself to me. But he is a dear good-natured creature all the same, and I should be sorry to offend him.’ She was silent all the way home; sitting in her comfortable corner of the carriage, wrapped to her chin in her soft white shawl, to all appearance asleep. Yet not once did her senses lose themselves in slumber. She was listening to the happy lovers, as they talked of the past—that part of the past which they had spent asunder. Gerald had been talking of a long mule-ride in Switzerland under just such a moonlit sky. It was no tremendous mountain ascent, only a ride from Evian up to a village at the foot of the Dent d’Oche, to look down upon Lake Leman and its lovely shores bathed in moonlight; the long dark range of the Jura rising like a wall on the western side; picturesque villages on the banks gleaming in the silver light, with their old church towers half hidden by masses of dark foliage; one lonely boat with its twin sails skimming like a swallow across the moonlit water. ‘It must have been delicious,’ said Lina. ‘It was very nice—except that you were not there. “But one thing want these banks of Rhine.”’