Suddenly she felt herself being drawn,--nay driven,--into the shelter of his arms. His lips trembled on her closed eyelids, were pressed on the slight scar left by the burn on her forehead, and then swiftly sought and found her soft quivering mouth----. But even then Berwick was very gentle with her, taking care to bruise neither the soul nor the body of the creature who was now, at last, completely subject to his will. Barbara tried to withdraw herself from his arms, but he still held her to him with a passion of mute feeling in his eyes; and then, while looking down at her strangely, as if wishing to see into her very heart, he suddenly exclaimed "Barbara, this can't go on! What is to happen to you and to me? As long as they left us alone I was content--ah no, not content, but submissive. But now? Do you think it is pleasant for me to do what I have had to do to-night,--to come here like a thief? While I was waiting for you, I told myself that doubtless you would refuse to come down. I had no right to ask you to come to me. It is I--I--who should always come to you----" He had released her, and drawn himself away. Now he was speaking with a tired bitterness which frightened her, and in a moment the desire to soothe, to comfort him, drove out from her every thought of self. "Of course I came down,--I will always come when you want me," she smiled at him with a look of shy, wistful tenderness. "Will you? Always? Is that true? Oh! Barbara, if I could only believe you mean those words, I could find courage to ask you--to say to you----" "What do you want to say to me?" Her voice sank to a whisper; then, seized with a sudden rush of love, of pity, of self-abnegation, she added, "Nay, I will tell you! You have come to ask of me what Lord Bosworth must once have come to ask of Madame Sampiero, and, like her, I will say, yes,--" she covered her face with her hands. And then she listened, very quietly, while Berwick told her, with broken words of passionate gratitude and endearment, of the plan which he had scarcely dared to believe he would have courage to propose. She knew he had a house, an old hunting lodge built by Louis XIII., on the edge of the Forest of St. Germains. It was a curious solitary pavilion, bought by his father as a very young man, and dear to Berwick and his sister as having been the scene,--the speaker's accents became more deeply tender,--of their parents' honeymoon. Within a drive of this enchanting spot was the little town of Poissy, where the mail train could be made to stop and where, the day after to-morrow, he would be waiting-- Barbara sat listening. She had raised her head and was staring straight before her. Berwick looked at her with entreating eyes--"It is close to Paris! Besides, they know you will be moving about."