The dinner at the Cedars went off very pleasantly. What dinner could fail to go off tolerably well, enlivened by Harcourt Lowther, when that gentleman cared to exercise his genius for making conversation? There were other guests at the merchant’s round table; and after dinner people showed an inclination to stroll out of the lamplit drawing-room on to the dusky lawn, and down to the terrace, drawn perhaps by the magnetic influence of the river, which _will_ be looked at. It happened somehow--I suppose Mr. Lowther himself managed it--that he and Maude were left a little way behind the rest of the loiterers upon the twilit terrace. Ah! how vividly in the memory of both arose the picture of a time long ago, when they had stood there side by side, by the same river, in a twilight calm like this, with the same star glimmering faintly in a low rose-tinted western sky! In Maude’s breast that memory awakened cruel pangs of shame and remorse! In Harcourt Lowther’s breast there was a strangely mingled feeling of bitterness and regret;--bitterness against the Destiny which had given him so few of life’s brightest possessions; regret for the vanished time in which some natural earnestness, some touch of fresh and manly feeling, had yet lingered in his heart. “Poor, simple, unworldly Maude,” he thought, as he contemplated the girl’s pale face, “what a penitent look she has! and yet if she knew----” He smiled, and left the thought unfinished. Then, turning to Maude, he said, with a little touch of melancholy solemnity, worthy of Edgar Ravenswood himself, “Miss Hillary, let us be friends. If you can bury the past, so can I. We may yet strew sweet flowers of friendship on the grave of our dead love.” “And I really don’t want to let Francis Tredethlyn slip through my fingers altogether,” Mr. Lowther added, mentally, as a sort of rider to that pretty little speech. Maude looked at him with rather a puzzled expression. “You are very generous,” she faltered, embarrassed, and at a loss how to express herself, “but--don’t you think it would be better for us--to--to say good-bye to each other--for ever? I--I--hope you will marry some one--worthy of you--some one who is less the slave of circumstances than I am. I want to do my duty to Mr. Tredethlyn--and I think it is a part of my duty to tell him of our broken engagement.”