As she ceased to speak, their lips met in a clinging kiss—a kiss which bound their two fates together from henceforth, for evermore, and which made her heart beat chokingly with terror and passion, but which was utterly devoid of the joy and springing rapture it might have had. When Magdalen said, ‘I know what you are,’ she spoke the truth. She was nearly a year older than he was, and had all her life seen very clearly out of her passive eyes. When he said, ‘Dare you do it?’ that meant, and she knew that it meant, not that he was going to give up his evil ways for her sake, and try to become mild and human and gentle, and a fitting husband for a civilised lady, but that she accepted his evil ways along with himself, and endured them as best she might. They sat silent for a while after this, till at last he said— ‘Magdalen!’ ‘Well?’ ‘You are not a good young woman, you know. You have not always stuck to people as you promised you would. They say—every one says—that you jilted Michael Langstroth,—did not keep your promises to him, you know.’ ‘They say what is quite true; and Michael Langstroth may thank me if I did jilt him. He was not made for me, nor I for him. I daresay he knows it by now.’ ‘He took his dismissal,’ pursued Otho, with a sneer, ‘and never raised his hand. But let me advise you not to try that game with me, or there might be murder done, or something as bad. I’m not Michael Langstroth. Do you understand?’ He spoke in a fierce whisper, and in Magdalen’s laugh, as she answered him, there was a hysterical sound. ‘Do you suppose I don’t know that! For every one of Michael Langstroth’s good qualities, you have half a dozen bad ones. If you wasted your whole life in trying, you could never get as much goodness into your whole body as he has in his little finger; and oh, how tired I was of it—how tired I was, before it was all over.’ ‘H’m! Well, I can promise that you shall never tire of my oppressive goodness and piety—that’s all.’ ‘I know you are a complete pagan; sometimes I think I am too. There’s one thing, Otho—you must not ask me to marry you yet; my aunt would faint at the idea that I was engaged to you, and I am not going to tell her, and leave her, and break her heart. Do you understand?’ ‘I understand that you think more of that old woman than of any one in the world,’ said Otho, surlily, ‘whatever you may profess; but I suppose you must have your way. And, Magdalen’—he dropped his voice—‘confess that you were worsted to-night. You found your master.’ ‘If I did, he might have been more generous. It was an odious thing that you did, to flout me, and openly play the gallant to a little chit who has always looked up to me with reverence. I can never have anything more to say to little Ada, now; and I can tell you, the child was almost my only amusement. I don’t know who will afford me any entertainment now.’ ‘I will,’ said Otho, with generous promptitude.