She linked her hands in his arm and drew him away. “Aunt Verna is tired now. Come away, and I will let you see her again to-morrow,” she said coaxingly. They went back to the drawing-room, and she sat down by his side on a velvet fauteuil, still keeping her hands clasped in his arm. But he sat by her pale and distrait, no pulse in his being answering to her blandishments. He was thinking, miserably: “Next week! Next week! How under heaven can I get out of this entanglement with honor to myself, and without scandal to Cora?” He cried hoarsely, displeasedly, in his uncontrollable misery: “Cora, why are you in such a hurry for the wedding?” He felt the quick start she gave as she leaned against him, heard the catch in her breath as she sobbed: “Oh, you are cruel! Think how often it has been postponed, and--and--I thought that you would be as impatient as I am! It--it--was Aunt Verna who advised it. She said: ‘Do not keep the poor fellow waiting long, Cora. No matter if I am sick, the marriage must not be postponed again! You can be married very quietly and go away, and no one will think hard of you, for you have suffered much and waited long!’ Oh, Frank, you seem so cold, so indifferent? Do not tell me you love me no more. If you tore that hope from me I should die here at your feet of my shame and my despair!” No man ever had a tenderer heart than Laurier. When he heard those passionate words from Cora’s lips, when he saw the burning tears in her dark eyes, he felt ashamed and remorseful that he had let his heart wander from her and fixed it on another. “Poor girl, she loves me well, and dare I risk the breaking of my troth to her? She might be driven to suicide, and her death would lie at my door,” he thought, in painful indecision that she clearly read with her keen, feminine intuition. She drooped sorrowfully before him, her hands clasped in a mute abandon of despair, as she continued pathetically: “If, indeed, you think I am hurrying up the wedding too much, I can postpone it again, though it would indeed be evil-omened, a third postponement. But I wish above all things to please you, my dearest. So tell me what you wish. Shall it be two weeks hence, or a month?” Frank felt like a contemptible wretch and villain, but he also knew she was weaving a web for him from which he could not escape, in honor. “Don’t fret any more, Cora! You need not postpone it a day longer than you choose. I’m ready any time you are!” “Then it shall be next week, as I had planned it, dearest. Must you go so soon?” as he rose. “Good night”--lifting her face for his careless kiss. CHAPTER XXXVII. STARTLING NEWS. Jessie Lyndon had been strong enough to send her lover from her because he was bound to another, but she was not brave enough to meet him daily in the intimate association of her mother’s home as she knew must be the case if she went to Mrs. Dalrymple’s before the wedding.