"I confess to being a little surprised that Fergusson ever got himself up to the scratch of asking a rich woman to marry him," Rupert said, with some hesitation. "It doesn't seem--quite like the man." "It wasn't in the least like the man," Christina answered demurely. "And--I'm afraid--I--made myself into a kind of--of matchmaker--or god in the machine, or something of that sort." Rupert laughed outright. "It was all your doing, was it?" he questioned, looking at her with smiling kindliness. "Did you----" "I don't think I can exactly tell you how I--I--worked the trick," she laughed a little confusedly. "But Cicely says it wouldn't ever have happened but for me. And I am glad." "So am I--very glad. Fergusson is a lucky man. A man who gets a woman like Cicely to take care of him, may consider a part of every day well spent, if he spends it in singing a _Te Deum_ of his own. And Sir Arthur's lost pendant--was it ever found?" "Yes; eventually the police traced the woman who had been in the railway carriage with Lady Congreve's bag, and she confessed to having stolen the jewel." After these words, silence again fell between them, until Christina once more made an attempt to rise. "I ought to go back," she said, when Rupert's detaining hand again fell on her arm. "Baba----" "Why should you go back when I want you here," was the audacious response. "I want you much more than Baba does." The hand he had laid on her arm lingered there; over the latter half of his sentence, his voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and the rose tints on Christina's cheeks brightened. "I believe I have been wanting you for quite a long time," he went on, deliberately, his eyes watching how the colour came and went on her face, his hand still resting on her arm. "Would you like to know how often, when I was wandering about the byways of Europe, I thought of that evening in Mrs. Nairne's oak-panelled parlour, when I told you so many things about myself? Would you like to know how often you came into my mind?" Christina's dark head was a little bent, her eyes were fastened on a clump of bracken, blazing golden in the level sun-rays, her voice was very low and a little shaky. "I--shouldn't have thought you would remember me at all," she said, the touch of his hand upon her arm filling her with a sensation of strange gladness. "On that afternoon I told you, I am sure I told you, how restful you were," Rupert continued, speaking with an eagerness that gave him an oddly boyish manner; "something in your personality rested me then, and I have never forgotten it. You rest me now," he added suddenly, his hand slipping from her arm, and folding itself over her hand. "I came here to-day, feeling as if the world were a sorry enough place, and I a poor fool who had messed up my life, and was at the end of my tether. But when I saw you, sitting here in the sunshine, I felt as if--some day--the sunlight might come back to my life."