bond between them, which should be avowed on the first possible occasion, but never made any display of while things were not ripe, everything should be exactly as before. This was perfectly fair in love, according to all known examples and rules. Something like it had happened in the majority of similar cases, and indeed, Cosmo said to himself with a half smile, a lover might feel himself little flattered for whom such a sacrifice would not be made. But all the same he could not suggest it. He could not say to Anne, ‘Tell a lie for me--persuade your father that all is over between us, though it is not all over between us and never shall be till death parts us.’ A young man of the nineteenth century, brought up at a public school and university, a member of the bar, and in very good society, could not say that. It would have been an anachronism. He might wish it, and did do so fervently; but to put it in words was impossible. It was with this view, however, that Cosmo had omitted all mention of correspondence in his last interviews with Anne. They were full of so much that was novel and exciting to her that she did not notice the omission, nor in the hurry and rush of new sensations in her mind had she that eager longing for a letter which most girls would have felt on parting with their lovers. She had no habit of letters. She had never been at school or made any friendships of the kind that need to be solaced by continual outpourings upon paper. Almost all her intimates were about her, seeing her often, not standing in need of correspondence. She had not even said in the hurry of parting, ‘You will write.’ Perhaps she saw it like himself, but like himself was unwilling to propose the absolute concealment which was desirable. Cosmo’s mind had been full of nothing else on his way to Scotland to his friend’s moor. He had thought of her half the time, and the other half of the time he had thought how to manage, how to secure her without injuring her (which was how he put it); the long night’s journey was made short to him by these thoughts. He did not sleep, and he did not want to sleep; the darkness of the world through which he was rushing, the jumble of perpetual sound, which made a sort of atmosphere about him, was as a hermitage to Cosmo, as it has been to many before him. Railway trains, indeed, are hermitages in life for the much-pondering and careworn sons of the present age. There they can shut themselves up and think at will. He turned it all over and over in his mind. No wild notion--such as had moved the inexperienced mind of Anne with a thrill of delightful impulse--of rushing back to work and instantly beginning the toil which was to win her, occurred to Anne’s lover. To be sure it was the Long Vacation, which is a thing girls do not take into account, and Cosmo would have smiled at the notion of giving up his shooting and going back to his chambers out of the mere sentiment of losing no time,