“Good-bye, Mr. Tredethlyn; I hope that all will come right, after all; and I hope that you will believe I am grateful for your goodness to my father.” She held out her hand, and the Cornishman took it in his own with almost as reverential a touch as if it had been some relic handed to him from an altar. The carriage drove off immediately after this, and Francis saw that seraphic bonnet with the spring-blossoms melt away and lose itself among mundane bonnets. He lingered at the rails till the carriage came back again, and still lingered after that, thinking that Miss Hillary’s equipage would again return to Hyde-Park Corner; but after out-watching all the loungers by the rails, and seeing the last of the carriages leaving the Ladies’ Mile, he was fain to go home, resigned to the obvious fact that Maude Hillary had left the Park by the Kensington gates on her homeward route. He went home, but not disconsolate. Had he not seen and spoken with that divinity before whom he was the simplest worshipper who ever bowed before any earthly shrine? Was he not assured of her forgiveness? nay, even of her gratitude? Her gratitude--Maude Hillary’s gratitude, in exchange for that vile dross which he had ever held so lightly. Money was indeed good for something, if it could buy the rapture of that little interview across the park-rail, in which Francis had played so very poor a part. He went home, and carried Maude Hillary’s image with him, and walked up and down his big sitting-room in the Covent Garden Hotel, smoking a cigar and thinking of the woman he loved: he thought of her quite as hopelessly as ever _Claude Melnotte_ could have thought of _Pauline_ before _Beauseant’s_ diabolical suggestions had prompted him to his treacherous wooing. He thought of her as innocently as a schoolboy thinks of the stage fairy-queen in a Christmas pantomime, and no ambitious or selfish dream had any abode in his mind; only when a brief note reached him from Lionel Hillary, renewing the old unceremonious invitation to the Cedars, poor Francis could no longer resist the voice of the charmer, but was fain to pack his portmanteau and drive down to the merchant’s office, whence Mr. Hillary was to convey him in the mail phaeton to Twickenham. She was not angry with him, and he might bask in the sunshine of her presence! For a little while he might enjoy the dangerous delight, and then the officer to whom she was betrothed would come back to claim her, and there would be a wedding at the old church by the Thames; and he, Francis, would see his divinity radiant in bridal robes and crowned with orange-flowers before he departed for ever into the outer darkness where she was not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIX. MR. HILLARY SPEAKS HIS MIND.