“Ah, don’t regret it!” he said, gravely, with a touch of sadness in his voice. “Your life has been a beautiful dream! May the awakening never come! Don’t speak of it remorsefully! To me it seems so precious----” He paused. “It is a perfect life for one like yourself. Do you see that star?” He stopped, and pointed upward. “Would you drag it from its place and its calm serenity to flicker in an oily lamp? Keep your pure and beautiful life as long as you can! Some day----” He stopped. “Some day?” she murmured, gently. “Some day,” he continued, “the temptation will come to you, the star of my thoughts, to descend and become a part of the hard and cruel world. Stay in the heaven of your present serenity, Miss Vanley!” It was strange talk in this prosaic, practical nineteenth century; but it did not seem strange or forced to Olivia. She drank in every word, and, if she did not at once feel its meaning, mentally stretched out her hands and sought for it. Just to keep him talking, to hear the deep, musical voice again, she said: “Is the world so wicked, then?” “Wicked and foolish,” he said; “and its folly is worse than its wickedness. I have made one discovery as I passed through it. Do you know what it is?” “No,” she murmured, drawing nearer to him. He laughed softly, and pushed his hat from his brow with a half weary gesture. “It is this: That though wickedness may go unpunished, folly never does. A man may commit a crime--many--and pass through the world undetected and unpunished, but if he commit a folly, Nemesis follows and closes upon him at once. And the moral of this is----” He stopped. “That it is wiser to be wicked than foolish,” she said. “Exactly!” he assented, with a strange smile. Bertie and the two Penstones had passed them, and reached the turning to The Dell, and here Olivia and Faradeane overtook them. “I don’t think I ought to go any farther,” he said, half-stopping; “your father has had enough of us to-night.” “No?” she said. “Why?” She paused, half timidly. “Why should you go; it must be lonely at home.” “It is lonely,” he said, with a smile half sad. “No one but I can tell how lonely.” “Why do you----” she began, and then stopped again. “Why do I live like a hermit and a recluse?” he said, gently. “We have some of us ceased to be masters of our own actions, Miss Vanley; I am so unlucky as to be one of those unfortunates.” She looked up at him with the timid, shrinking glance of a woman whose heart aches with sympathy, and yet who has not power to give it. “If I--if my father--could do anything,” she murmured. He held out his hand and took hers, and he held it, not pressing it, but enfolding it in his strong, shapely one. “You have done much already,” he said, in a low voice, “more than you can guess; yes, much more. Good-night, Miss Vanley.” Obeying an impulse, one of those impulses which were rare with her, she raised her beautiful eyes to his.