Mary's warnings to Ellinor to 'be wary' recurred to the latter persistently and reproachfully, yet she never wavered or swerved from her purpose, though with reference to marriage there came to her memory the words of a writer who says it _is_ a solemn thing when you come to think of it, that if you make a mistake in the matter you are in for it, and nothing can pull you out again. Ellinor's ambition was, as we have shown, dazzled on one hand, while love and novelty lured her on the other. Her heart was wrung by the duplicity with which she was treating her sister, and the contemplation of what that sister's emotions would be when she was missed; but Sleath's brilliant promises and visions of the future that was before them, deadened the sense of the present for a time. She wrote a farewell letter to Mary, which the latter would in time find on her toilet table. 'The first step is taken now, I cannot retrace it,' thought Ellinor, as she closed this letter, a very incoherent and blurred one; 'and now to begone--to steal away without seeing darling Mary, whom I could not look in the face.' Nervously and hurriedly she went through her drawers and repositories, selecting and thrusting into a hand-bag those articles which she thought were necessary for her journey or flight. Now and then something turned up which reminded her of happy past hours, of Mary's love, and their parents' memory; she gazed with tear-blinded eyes on some faded photographs, and kissed them passionately as if she could neither look on them long enough nor part with them. At last her assortment was made, and, fearful of meeting Mary, she threw on her hat and cloak, grasped her bag, slipped softly from the house by a back way, and passing through the old doorway with the date and legend on its lintel, went quickly towards the place of meeting, with her heart beating wildly, painfully, and all her pulses tingling. The anxiety--the craving that had possessed her at times to get away from the reproachful eyes of Robert Wodrow and the upbraiding speeches of his mother, was about to be relieved now; for under the mal-influence of Sleath the girl's nature seemed to have been changed, but the last words Mrs. Wodrow had said to her were in her memory then:-- 'You took the love of my boy--the one deep love of his life it seemed to be--made a plaything of his heart, and then cast it aside to break and wither, it may be to die!' Anyone who saw Ellinor at this juncture would have found a curious rigidity in the usually soft outline of her sweet face, and a perplexed and troubled expression in her hazel eyes as she walked onward, feeling it was not yet too late to return.