Did the vicinity of Shafto, though unknown to Florian, mysteriously prompt this thought--this boding fear. Shafto heard the words, and a strange smile spread over his face as he shook his clenched hand at the absorbed pair, and stole away from his hiding-place, leaving two foolish hearts full of a foolish dream from which they might be roughly awakened--leaving the happy Florian, with that sweet and winsome Dulcie whom he loved, and with whom he had played even as a child; with whom he had shared many a pot of clotted cream; with whom he had fished for trout in the Erme and Yealm; explored with fearful steps and awe-stricken heart the cavern there, where lie thick the fossil bones of the elephant, hyæna, and wolf; and wandered for hours by the moors, among mossy rocks and mossy trees, and in woody labyrinthine lanes, and many a time and oft by the sea shore, where the cliffs are upheaved and contorted in a manner beyond description, but so loosely bound together that waves rend them asunder, and shape them into forms like ruined castles and stranded ships; till, as years went on, heart had spoken to heart; boy and girl life had been left behind; and that dream-time came in which they seemed to live for years. No one could accuse Dulcie Carlyon of coquetry, her nature was too truthful and open for that; thus she had never for a moment wavered in her preference between Florian and Shafto, and spent with the former those bright and hopeful hours that seldom come again with the same keen intensity in a lifetime, though often clouded by vague doubts. As yet they had led a kind of Paul and Virginia life, without very defined ideas of their future; in fact, perhaps scarcely considering what that future might be. They only knew, like the impassioned boy and girl in the beautiful story of Bernardin St. Pierre, that they loved each other very dearly, and for the sweet present that sufficed; while cunning Shafto Gyle looked darkly, gloomily, and enviously on them. Perhaps it was his fast failing health that prevented Lennard Melfort from looking more closely into this matter, or it may be that he remembered the youthful love of his own heart; for he could never forget her whom he was so soon to join now, and who, 'after life's fitful fever,' slept by the grey wall of Revelstoke, within sound of the restless sea. Dulcie's father, Lawyer Carlyon, heard rumours of these meetings and rambles, and probably liked them as little as the Major did; but he was a busy man absorbed in his work, and had been used to seeing the pair together since they were toddling children. Lennard, perhaps, thought it was as well to let them alone, as nothing would come of it, while the lawyer treated it surlily as a kind of joke. 'Why, Dulcie, my girl,' said he one day, 'what is to be the end of all this philandering but spoiling your own market, perhaps? Do you expect a young fellow to marry you who has no money, no prospects, no position in the world?'