"You are mistaken," she answers, roused into vehemence. "I love you so well, that I have grown hateful to myself!" and having spoken thus oracularly, she raises herself on tiptoe, lifts two shy burning lips to his, and kisses him voluntarily. Then, amazed at her own audacity, clothed with shame as with a garment, she tears herself out of his arms, as in delightful surprise he catches her to his heart, and flies with frenzied haste into the house. CHAPTER XVII. The sweetness of September is that of the last few days spent with a friend that goeth on a very long journey; and we know not whether, when he returneth, we shall go to meet him with outstretched arms, or shall smile up at him only through the eyes of the daisies that flower upon our straight green graves. "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought," and our sweetest seasons are, to my thinking, those in which the ecstasies of possession are mixed with the soft pain of expected parting. A September sun--such a one as warmly kissed the quiet faces of our young dead heroes, as they lay thick together on Alma's hill-side--is shining down with even mildness upon the just and the unjust, upon Constance Blessington's grass-green gown as she sits at breakfast, and on the hair crown of yellow gold with which Providence has seen fit to circle her dull fair brows. "I think that you must have regretted being in such a hurry to run away from the garden and us," she is saying, with a gentle smile of lady-like malice, to Esther, _à propos_ of her yesterday's misadventure. "Sitting in the shade eating nectarines is certainly pleasanter occupation than grovelling on your hands and knees on a mud-bank," replies Esther, demurely. "St. John is so terribly energetic!" says Miss Blessington, rather lackadaisically; "he would have walked me off the face of the earth long ago if I had let him." Remembering the Chinese invitation, Esther cannot repress an involuntary smile. "What about St. John?" says the young man, entering; having caught his own name, with that wonderful acuteness of hearing with which every one is endowed when themselves are in question. "Much better have stuck to your parish church," says Sir Thomas, brandishing a large red and yellow bandanna, which is part of the old English costume, "than gone scrambling heigh-go-mad over hedges and ditches after new-fangled Puseyite mummeries!" Gerard and his betrothed exchange a glance of intelligence. Gerard is looking slightly sentimental; his head is a little on one side; but on his discovering that he is an object of attention to Constance, it returns rather suddenly to the perpendicular.