"I say, Min," began Archie, "aren't you going to tell us what the row was on Saturday night? What mysterious traffic is going on between you and Charlie? I was teasing him to tell me yesterday, but he was as silent as the Sphinx." "And what if I intend to be as silent as that famous monument also?" Asked Minnie. "O, come now!" Replied he, in a coaxing tone, "you couldn't, you know, you're just dying to tell, as much as I am to hear what before-unheard of circumstance induced him to turn out on a Saturday night, and a wet and stormy one too." "Am I?" She asked, looking at him with a provokingly doubtful expression, but feeling rather nervous all the time. "Then I must congratulate you on being a great deal better acquainted with my state of mind than I am myself. I don't know how it is, but for my own part, I confess that I cannot find any indication of such a condition as you describe." Here Seymour looked up. "I think," he remarked, quietly. "That I might give you a _little_ further information on the subject, since you seem so very much interested in it. Minnie was along with Charlie on Saturday night, on his interesting errand, and also Miss Chartres." Archie gave a low whistle of surprise, and stared at Seymour, as though expecting him to say more, but if such was his expectation, he was doomed to disappointment, for Seymour having delivered in these few words the full extent of his information on the topic under discussion, closed his lips and turned his attention to his book again. Minnie looked distressed, but Archie did not notice it in his astonishment and eagerness to know more about this mysterious proceeding. "Is it true, Minnie?" he demanded. "Seymour, who told you that?--I declare I don't believe a word of it." "Edward Laurence told me," replied Seymour, without looking up. "His mother was down there at Hollowmell yesterday, and came home full of it. I did not know before to-day that I had a saint for a sister; and as for not believing it, if you don't, just look at her and you soon will." And sure enough her face was dyed with a hot flush that mounted even as he spoke to the roots of her hair, though he could only have been instinctively aware of her confusion, for his head was still bent over his book. Archie looked from the one to the other in open-mouthed astonishment for a minute or two, and then it dawned upon him that Minnie looked, to say the least of it, uncomfortable, and stifling his curiosity, which was by this time greater than ever, as best he could, suddenly relapsed into silence. Soon afterwards Seymour left the room, and Minnie resolved to seize this opportunity of telling Archie the real facts of the case.