Each was looking in the other's face for a moment, and each face grew suddenly dark, darker--and the whole room darkened as the air was overshadowed by a mass of cloud that eclipsed the sun, threatening thunder. "By Jove! How awfully dark in a moment!" said Arden, looking from the face thus suddenly overcast through the window towards the sky. "Dark as the future we were speaking of," said Longcluse, with a sad smile. "Dark in one sense, I mean unseen, but not darkened in the ill-omened sense," said Richard Arden. "I have great confidence in the future. I suppose I am sanguine." "I ought to be sanguine, if having been lucky hitherto should make one so, and yet I'm not. _My_ happiness depends on that which I cannot, in the least, control. Thought, action, energy, contribute nothing, and so I but drift, and--my heart fails me. Tell me, Arden, for Heaven's sake, truth--spare me nothing, conceal nothing. Let me but know it, however bitter. First tell me, does Miss Arden dislike me--has she an antipathy to me?" "Dislike you! Nonsense. How could that be? She evidently enjoys your society, when you are in spirits and choose to be amusing. Dislike you? Oh, my dear Longcluse, you can't have fancied such a thing!" said Arden. "A man placed as I am may fancy anything--things infinitely more unlikely. I sometimes hope she has never perceived my admiration. It seems strange and cruel, but I believe where a man cannot be beloved, nothing is so likely to make him _hated_ as his presuming to love. _There_ is the secret of half the tragedies we read of. The man cannot cease to love, and the idol of his passion not only disregards but insults it. It is their cruel nature; and thus the pangs of jealousy and the agitations of despair are heightened by a peculiar torture, the hardest of all hell's torture to endure." "Well, I have seen you pretty often together, and you must see there is nothing of that kind," said Arden. "You speak quite frankly, do you? For Heaven's sake don't spare me!" urged Longcluse. "I say exactly what I think. There can't be any such feeling," said Arden. Longcluse sighed, looked down thoughtfully, and then, raising his eyes again, he said-- "You must answer me another question, dear Arden, and I shall, for the present, task your kindness no more. If you think it a fair question, will you promise to answer me with unsparing frankness? Let me hear the worst." "Certainly," answered his companion. "Does your sister like anyone in particular--is she attached to anyone--are her affections quite disengaged?" "So far as I am aware, certainly. She never cared for any one among all the people who admired her, and I am quite certain such a thing could not be without my observing it," answered Richard Arden. "I don't know; perhaps not," said Longcluse. "But there is a young friend of yours, who I thought was an admirer of Miss Arden's, and possibly a favoured one. You guess, I daresay, who it is I mean?"