“My darling! when you know what my feeling is on that subject--anything but that, Rita; ask me anything but that.” “Well,” she replied, “Mr. Oliver said there would be no difficulty about it; he said he would take the most precious care of me. Is that slang, papa?” “Slang? bless my heart, it sounds like something quite different to me,” cried the Vice-Consul, frowning. But Rita once more put her hand upon his mouth. “You know better than I do,” she said, demurely. “I could not be sure which it was; but you may make yourself quite comfortable, papa, for Mr. Oliver is very conscientious, and never said a word. I begin,” she said pensively, “to understand English now.” “Rita, I think you must be taking leave of your senses. You begin to understand English! your own language!” She nodded her head a great many times in reply. “Yes, I begin to understand it,” she said. And this was all he could get out of her. She began presently to talk upon other subjects, and kept him amused all the rest of the evening, and Harry was not mentioned again between them. But Harry himself, poor fellow, went home like the wind, or rather like a straw blown before the wind; hastening, without any apparent movement of his own, to the bare rooms which were his only refuge. He arrived there panting like a man pursued, and shut his door as if it were a fence between him and his pursuers. He could not have explained to himself why he did this, for Rita, though she had certainly assailed him, had not come after him through the streets, as by his appearance one might have thought she had done, forcing him to his best speed. But when he sat down and thought it all over, though Harry was excited to the highest degree, it could scarcely be said of him that he was unhappy. He was breathless with the excitement of his escape. He said to himself that he must not go again; that he would not run such risks again, that another time he must betray himself; but all the time, underneath everything, he had the consciousness that his very flight had told his story as effectually as words could have done it, and that she could not now be at any loss to know what was the moving spring of all his recent life. He felt that she had suspected him all these days. He knew that she had meant to surprise his secret somehow, whether in simple love of mischief and curiosity, or whether with some other motive, who could tell? but certainly this was what she had been doing: and there dawned upon him a light of something which was not exactly hope, but which yet warmed and brightened his horizon, and made the whole world somehow a better, a less heavy and tedious place. He did not say even to himself that anything definite was in his hope; what he said was that he could not go back, that he would run no more risks, that, whatever might be said to him on the subject, his policy was to keep away. But this had no such tragic meaning to him as it had on the