He spoke with an earnestness that went to Neva’s soul. She trembled, as if the burden of responsibility laid upon her were too heavy to be borne. In her uplifted eyes was a wild, beseeching look, as if she called upon her father from his home in heaven to aid her now. “Remember,” said Rufus desperately, “you are deciding upon my life or death--mortal and physical!” Neva read in the declaration an awful sincerity that made her shudder. “I must think,” she faltered. “I cannot decide so suddenly. Give me a week, Rufus--only a week in which to decide. Oh,” she added, under her breath, with a passionate emphasis, “if papa only knew! He would have spared me this.” Rufus assented to the delay with a beaming face. If she had intended to refuse him, he thought, she would have done so on the spot. But she had not refused him, and there was hope. She should be his wife, and he would be master of Hawkhurst yet. In the midst of his self-gratulations, Neva arose and walked slowly onward, grave and sorrowful. Rufus walked beside her with a joyous tread. When they had passed on into the thickening shadows, and the primrose bank had been left far behind, a ragged, childish figure stirred itself from the further shadow of the thicket, and a childish face, wan and thin and haggard, with a woman’s woe in the great dark eyes, looked after the young pair with an awful horror and despair. That face belonged to the disowned young wife whom Rufus mourned as dead! The wild and woful eyes were the eyes of Lally Bird! CHAPTER XVII. THE YOUNG WIFE’S DESOLATION. It was indeed poor Lally Bird, the wronged young wife, whom her husband mourned as dead, who, crouching in the shelter of the way-side thicket, stared after Neva Wynde and Rufus Black with eyes full of a burning woe and despair. “He loves her! He loves her!” the poor young creature moaned, in the utter abandonment of her terrible anguish. “He said her answer meant life and death to him! And I am so soon forgotten? Oh, he never loved me--never--never! And he does love her with all his soul--O Heaven!” She sank back into the deeper shadow of the thicket, moaning and wringing her hands. Her hat had fallen off, and her face was upturned to the gray evening sky. That face, still childlike in its outlines and in its innocence, yet sharp of feature, wan, thin and haggard, was full of wild beseeching. The great hungry black eyes were upraised to Heaven in agonized appeal. How terribly alone in all the wide world she was! Alone and friendless, with no roof to shelter her, no food to break a long fast, no money. She was ragged and forlorn, her feet peeping from their frail coverings, her sharpened elbows protruding through her sleeves. And now her last hope had been dashed from her, and it seemed as if nothing remained to her but to die. The story of her life from the moment in which she had fled from her dingy lodgings at New Brompton, had been one of bitterness and privation.