But she had passed her word, plighted her troth, given her promise to this man, and why should she not redeem her pledge? She was leaving a homely and dull, a grey and sequestered, if perfectly peaceful life, for the new and brilliant one to be shared with him, who loved her so well, and she would fulfil her contract. Some--no doubt many--there would be who might have no pity for the rash imprudence of a motherless girl yielding to the temptation given her and eloping thus; and her name, her story, and her transgression, in many a false version, might be bandied from lip to lip, a conviction that galled and fretted her naturally proud spirit; but the consciousness of all this was inferior to a sense of what she knew Mary would feel, on finding herself deceived thus and left alone--alone to face the scandal, gossip, _esclandre_, and reprehension to which her act would give rise; and the knowledge gave Ellinor acute mental agony. She had been that morning at the churchyard, as if to bid her parents farewell in spirit, and saw the last chaplets that she and Mary had woven lying on their graves, all withered now, and she had marvelled when flowers from her hands would be laid there again. All was still around her now; she could hear, however, the voice of Mary's tame owl in its nest in the garden wall, and the rush of the May over its rocky bed. When might she hear that familiar sound in the sweet moonlight again? Ay, Ellinor, when? Perfectly cool and audacious Sir Redmond Sleath was at the appointed place betimes, and though an intrigue or adventure of this kind was nothing new to him, his heart was certainly beating faster than usual under his well-cut coat as he quitted the hired brougham at the end of the lane which diverged from the highway towards Birkwoodbrae. The moon, a sickly and slender one, was waning, and the chill, pale light of its crescent cast the shadows of the tall silver birches across the pathway as he picked his way forward to where the outline of the house at Birkwoodbrae came before him, with its grey walls and windows half covered by masses of monthly roses and Virginia creepers. The house and all around it seemed still as the grave. He had come betimes, we say, and was thus at his post a little before Ellinor came forth to meet him. He heard no sound and saw no sign, and to him seconds seemed like minutes--minutes hours. Could anything have happened? Had Mary baffled the plans of Ellinor, or had the courage of the latter failed her at the last moment? He had known of such things; and there was a curious suppressed gleam--a latent glitter in his cold blue eyes that would not have been pleasant to see.