His blundering whisper did what my presence and by no means light footsteps had failed to do. With a start Lucetta turned and, meeting my eye, drew back in visible confusion. The young man followed her hastily. "Is it good-by, Lucetta?" he pleaded, with a fine, manly ignoring of our presence that roused my admiration. She did not answer. Her look was enough. William, seeing it, turned furious at once, and, bounding by me, faced the young man with an oath. "You're a fool to take no from a silly chit like that," he vociferated. "If I loved a girl as you say you love Lucetta, I'd have her if I had to carry her away by force. She'd stop screaming before she was well out of the lane. I know women. While you listen to them they'll talk and talk; but once let a man take matters into his own hands and--" A snap of his fingers finished the sentence. I thought the fellow brutal, but scarcely so stupid as I had heretofore considered him. His words, however, might just as well have been uttered into empty air. The young man he so violently addressed appeared hardly to have heard him, and as for Lucetta, she was so nearly insensible from misery that she had sufficient ado to keep herself from falling at her lover's feet. "Lucetta, Lucetta, is it then good-by? You will not go with me?" "I cannot. William, here, knows that I cannot. I must wait till----" But here her brother seized her so violently by the wrist that she stopped from sheer pain, I fear. However that was, she turned pale as death under his clutch, and, when he tried to utter some hot, passionate words into her ear, shook her head, but did not speak, though her lover was gazing with a last, final appeal into her eyes. The delicate girl was bearing out my estimate of her. Seeing her thus unresponsive, William flung her hand from him and turned upon me. "It's your fault," he cried. "You _would_ come in----" But, at this, Lucetta, recovering her poise in a moment, cried out shrilly: "For shame, William! What has Miss Butterworth to do with this? You are not helping me with your roughness. God knows I find this hour hard enough, without this show of anxiety on your part to be rid of me." "There's woman's gratitude for you," was his snarling reply. "I offer to take all the responsibilities on my own shoulders and make it right with--with her sister, and all that, and she calls it desire to get rid of her. Well, have your own way," he growled, storming down the hall; "I'm done with it for one." The young man, whose attitude of reserve, mixed with a strange and lingering tenderness for this girl, whom he evidently loved without fully understanding her, was every minute winning more and more of my admiration, had meanwhile raised her trembling hand to his lips in what was, as we all could see, a last farewell.