'Good heavens! and this secret?' 'Is mine also--I have the key to it.' 'Yours!' 'Yes--you look perplexed--even distressed; nevertheless it is so,' she rejoined, tapping the floor, as if impatient, with a slim and pretty foot. 'Will it ever be unravelled?' 'Yes--very soon now, perhaps.' 'But when?' 'When the proper time comes. Till then, Captain Goring, I shall trust to your friendship for myself and Captain Dalton not to attempt to probe it, or act the umpire or match-maker between us.' She said this emphatically, and with one of her sweetest smiles, while her soft white hand was placed confidently in that of Goring. 'I shall be silent as the grave,' said he. 'I have suspected something of this kind. At times a great gloom comes over poor Tony; there has been some mystery about his early life; what, I cannot divine; but it drove him into the ranks, and made him for years loathe England and English society, which he avoided as much as possible. He seems to have got over that whim now, and to you I look forward as the means of effecting a perfect cure.' She gave Goring one of her soft and inexplicable smiles, and then, drooping her eyelids said, with a sigh, but apparently one of pleasure, 'You expect too much from me, Captain Goring.' Mrs. Trelawney promised him, the moment she could obtain, through any source, some tidings of Alison's whereabouts, to let him know, and he bade her adieu with his mind full of doubt and anxiety--not doubt of Alison's faith, but of their mutual future; and anxiety for the annoyances to which she might be subjected, and the pressure that might in many ways be put upon her. That Cadbury was in her society was an irritating circumstance; but a peer of the realm was some one of consequence, and his movements would ere long most probably be a clue to hers. Mrs. Trelawney's mysterious hints about her knowledge of Dalton's past life gave Goring some food for reflection, and he knew not what to think of them. 'So--she seems to have refused Tony, as she did Jerry Wilmot; by Jove, she must be difficult to please!' thought he, as he turned his horse in the direction of Aldershot, often giving a long, earnest, and hopeless farewell glance at the old trysting-place beside the beeches. But Jerry by this time had quite got over his fancy for Mrs. Trelawney, and found a new divinity in the person of her friend, Miss Bella Chevenix, whom he had known from her girlhood, but who now became invested with new and sudden interest to him. Days passed slowly in succession now, but to Goring there came no tidings of the absent one. Thus life in the winter camp at Aldershot became an intolerable bore to him, and he longed for action of any kind; but now rumours went abroad that troubles were in store at the Cape, and the regiment would be one of the first dispatched to Africa. CHAPTER XVIII. WILMOTHURST. His changed mood of mind did not escape the attention of his friend Jerry Wilmot, who said to him one day,