"Is he? I don't know much about love; but if he loves you, you surely want him to respect you. You would not like him to be a worse man for loving you,--and he must become a worse man, if he has a low opinion of women." "You mean that I am not to meet him any more?" "I mean that he cannot possibly respect you, while he knows you meet him without your mother's knowledge." "And suppose I won't promise not to meet him again, what will you do?" "I don't consider that I have the smallest right to exact a promise from you." "Then you won't speak of this to any one, whatever happens?" Mona smiled. "I am not quite clear that you have any right to exact a promise from me." Matilda could not help joining in the smile. This was good fencing. "At any rate, you have not told any one yet?" "I have not." "Not Miss Simpson?" "Not any one; and therefore not Miss Simpson." "Well, I must say it was very kind of you." "I am afraid I ought not to accept your praise; it never occurred to me to speak of it." "And yet you recognised me?" Mona laughed outright--a very friendly laugh. "And yet I recognised you." Matilda drew the sole of her high-heeled shoe over the ground in front of her, and began an entirely new design. "What do you mean by 'respect,' Miss Maclean? It is such a chilly word. There is no warmth or colour in it." "There is no warmth nor colour in the air, yet air is even more essential than sunshine." There was silence for some minutes. Matilda obliterated the new design with a little stamp of her foot. "Long ago, when I was a girl, I began to believe in self-denial, and high ideals, and all that sort of thing. But you can't work it in with your everyday life. It is all a dream." "A dream!" said Mona softly,-- "'No, no, by all the martyrs and the dear dead Christ!' Everything else is a dream. That is real. That was your chance in life. You should have clung to it with both hands. Your soul is drowning now for want of it, in a sea of nothingness." The revival preacher himself could scarcely have spoken more strongly, and Matilda felt a slight pleasurable return of the old excitement. She did not show it, however. "It is easy to talk," she said, "but you don't know what it is to be the richest people in a place like this. Pa and Ma won't let anybody speak to us. I believe it will end in our never getting married at all. We shall be out of the wood before they find their straight stick." "My dear child, is marriage the end of life? And even if it is, surely the girls who make good wives are those who are content to be the life and brightness of their home circle, and who are not constantly straining their eyes in search of the knight-errant who is to deliver them from Giant Irksome."