'Then they know more than I do--but to whom have my good friends assigned me?' 'To your cousin.' 'Roland!' 'Yes.' 'I am not engaged to Roland certainly,' replied Hester, her lips and eyelashes quivering as she spoke. 'I thought not,' said Malcolm Skene, gathering courage; 'Miss Drummond seems to me his chief attraction. If he is as happy as I wish him, he will be the happiest of deserving men.' 'The phrase of a novel writer, Mr. Skene,' said Hester, a little bitterly, as she thought over some episodes at Merlwood; 'but do not talk so inflatedly of what men deserve. The best of them are often unwise, unkind, unjust.' 'Do not blame all men for the faults perhaps of one,' said Skene at haphazard, and a little unluckily, as the speech went home to Hester's heart. She grew pale, as if he had divined her secret. 'I do not understand you,' she faltered a little haughtily, while flashing one upward glance at him. 'Considering the way you view men now, and the way you avoid or rebuff me, I wonder that I have got a word with you, as I do to-night.' 'Do I rebuff you?' 'Yes--to my sorrow, I have felt it.' 'Sorrow--of what do you really accuse me?' 'Treating me with coldness, distance----' 'I am not aware--that--that----' she paused, not knowing what to say. 'Hester--dearest Hester,' said he in a low and earnest voice, while stealing nearer her and assuring himself by one swift glance that they were alone in the conservatory; 'let me call you so, were it only for to-night--you know how long I have loved you, and surely you will love me a little in time. I know how true, how tender of heart you are; I know, too, that I have no rival in the present--with the past I have nothing to do; but tell me, even silently, by one touch of your hand, that you love me in turn, or will try to love me in time, Hester--dear, dear Hester!' She opened her lips, but no sound came from them, and her interlaced hands trembled in her lap, for the 'scene' had gone somewhat beyond her idea in depth and earnestness; and she felt that Malcolm Skene's deduction as regarded there being no rival in the present was a mistake in one sense. Encouraged by her silence, and construing it in his own favour, little conceiving that her head was then full of a false idol, he resumed: 'Hester, ever since I first saw and knew you, it has been the great hope of my existence to make you my wife.' Still the girl was voiceless, and felt chained to her seat. She could feel--yea, could hear her heart beating painfully, as she had a pure regard and most perfect esteem for the young fellow by her side; and thought that to the end of her days the perfume of the lily of the valley, of stephanotis, and other plants close by would come back to memory with Malcolm's voice, the strains of Strauss, the strange atmosphere of the conservatory, and the dull sense of unreality that was over her then.