"Oh, Uncle Langton, how _could_ you--how _could_ you?" she cries, in bitter distress. "It--it is too--too absurd. He never could, you know----" "There--there, don't cry, dear," he soothes, gently. "I am an old bungler, I know, and I shouldn't have said it so plain, but the fact remains. Vane Charteris, whether he knows it or not, is falling in love with you, my dear, and is correspondingly jealous of the baronet's attentions to you." The beautiful dark eyes looked at him incredulously. She shakes her head. "You are mistaken," she answers, decidedly. "Your hopes mislead you. Confess now," smiling pensively through her tears, "that 'the wish was father to the thought.'" "Perhaps so," he answers, willing to drop the subject and sorry he had agitated it. * * * * * Vane goes home rather ruefully, without breakfasting with Mr. Langton, as he had promised himself. "What possessed me to be so rude, I wonder?" he soliloquizes. "Though I did not love her, it was awkward and ill-considered to cast it in her teeth. I begin to believe that it is I who am brusk and unmannerly, not she." The day goes, long and wearily it seems to Vane, who is conscious of some new feeling he cannot realize, perhaps does not try to. He smokes and reads, turning an unsociable cold shoulder on the rather dry _habitues_ of the hotel. In the evening, drawn by "a spirit in his feet," and thoroughly _ennuyed_ with his own society, he saunters over to the Sea View Hotel. On his way he meditates rather slowly. "It is doubtful whether she will receive me," his musings run. "I was rude this morning. Of course the little spitfire will resent it. She has too much spirit to tamely brook such shameless impudence. I certainly forgot myself in my vexation at that stupid old man." The wide balcony of the Sea View presents a pleasant sight. A dozen or two of "young men and maidens" are assembled on it, some sitting, some walking, but one and all flirting with the greatest interest and delight. Vane's quick eye singles out one solitary figure sitting apart from the rest, a slight, girlish one in white, the dark head bent over a book. To this figure Vane goes forward, not without a lurking dread of meeting a petulant repulse. He stops behind her chair, and Reine, startled, looks around. Vane is relieved to find that there is no resentment in her face, only a new, sweet gravity a little strange to see on the piquant, girlish face. "Ah, it is you, Mr. Charteris!" she says, carelessly. "You left us so unceremoniously this morning, I fear--thought you would not return." Vane slips into the chair beside her, his heart unconsciously lightened of the burden that has weighed it down all day.