“Since you don’t drink your wine, you may as well go for a stroll in the garden, Tredethlyn,” he said, good-naturedly. “I see Maude yonder; and she’ll be better company for you than I am.” Francis was by no means slow to take this hint. But once outside the dining-room windows, he went very slowly to the terrace on which Maude was walking. He walked in and out among the flower-beds, making a faint pretence of admiring nature in this twilight aspect. He stopped to caress one of Maude’s Skye terriers. The animals were very fond of him now that he had learned to avoid that trampling on their toes which had been one of the earlier manifestations of his devotion to Miss Hillary. He loitered here and there on every possible pretext, and at last approached the fair deity in the muslin dress with very much the air of a schoolboy, who presents himself in that awful audience-chamber wherein a grim pedagogue is wont to pronounce terrible judgments upon youthful offenders. He did not know that Miss Hillary had been expecting him all this time; and that her special purpose was to bring him to her side upon that solitary terrace-walk, where she could talk to him freely without fear of eavesdroppers. He did not know that he was quite as much expected as the schoolboy who has been summoned to the parlour, and was to receive a sentence as terrible. Maude welcomed him very graciously, and for a little while they strolled side by side, talking of the summer’s night, and the flowers, and Skye terriers, and canary-birds, and other subjects equally commonplace and harmless. Then they came to a stop, mechanically, as it is in the nature of people to do when they walk by the side of a river, and looked over the stone balustrade into the still water. And then a death-like silence came down upon them; and Maude Hillary felt that the time had come in which she must utter whatever she had it in her mind to say. It was difficult to begin; but then all her duties of late had been difficult; and upon her knees the night before, in the midst of tearful prayers and meditations, she had resolved that there should be no more sailing under false colours as regarded this young man. “Dear Mr. Tredethlyn,” she began at last, “you have been so good to my father, so good to me--for to serve him is to render a double service to me--you have been so kind and generous a friend, that I have grown to think of you and trust you almost as I might if you had been my brother.” Poor Francis listened to this exordium with a very despondent air. Inexperienced as he was in the ways of the world, he was wise enough to know that there was nothing hopeful in such an address as this. When a young lady tells a gentleman that she can regard him as a brother, it is the plainest possible declaration that he can never be anything else. In this case it seemed an uncalled-for act of cruelty, for the Cornishman had never deluded himself by any false hope.