*IN WHICH THE MYSTERIOUS LADY REAPPEARS AND HELPS JACK TO VANISH* [Illustration: Chapter X headpiece] Marjolaine was bewildered, overjoyed, indignant, and too breathless even to cry out. Jack swept her off her feet. "Come into the Gazebo!" he cried, and before she could remember where she was, she was on the seat in the summer-house and Jack had hold of both her hands and was saying impetuously, "Marjory, I love you!" She sank into his arms, utterly overwhelmed. It was as if a cyclone had whirled her away. "I love you, I love you, little Marjory," he was murmuring into her ear. "I loved you the first moment I saw you under the elm!" Under the elm! Her memory came rushing back. She broke away from him and her eyes flashed indignantly. "How dare you!" she cried. "Oh! how dare you! I didn’t know what I was doing. Go away! You broke your word! You never came!" "I come now!" he answered, with a fine air of injured innocence. "In a horrible disguise!" said she, looking with disgust at the Eyesore’s hat and smock lying disconsolately where Jack had thrown them, "and too late!" She broke into sobs. "I have promised not to love you!" "Whom have you promised?" "My dear, dear Mother." She had stood up and was trying to look like a dutiful daughter. But he made that very difficult by seizing her hand and drawing her down to his side again. "Don’t you love me?" said he. "If I did, I ’ve promised not to!" she replied firmly. "What ’s the use of that, if you do?" Jack did n’t know it, but he had put a question which undermined all first principles. "_I_ keep my word!" she replied, with great dignity. It was no answer to his question, but it saved her for the moment. The implied reproach turned his position and forced him to be on the defensive. "So do I!" he said, quite boldly and unabashed: so unabashed that she could only stare at him in amazement and cry "Oh!" "Differently," he explained. "I told my father; and I promised I ’d stay away a week, to make sure. I ’ve made sure, and I ’ve come. Is n’t that keeping my word?" Marjolaine was shaken, and he had stated his case so cunningly that she could not, on the spur of the moment, put her finger on the weak point—the truth being, that she did not want to. "It seems so, when you tell it, but—" "Do they want you to marry somebody else?" said he. "No." "Well, they want me to!" and he added with modest but conscious virtue, "but I refused." "That’s it!" cried Marjolaine, remembering all the Admiral had innocently let drop. "You ’re a great man; by-and-by you ’ll live in marble halls; and you never said a word about it!" "Hang it all!" cried Jack, protesting with all his might, "I told you my name! I can’t go about shouting I ’m a lord’s son!"