They must have been long minutes, because it is quite an hour later when a little slender figure, clad in a pretty white dressing-gown, emerges on tiptoe from Mrs. Bohun's room and steals hurriedly along the deserted corridor. Somebody else is hurrying along this corridor, too. Seeing the childish figure in the white gown, he pauses; perhaps he thinks it is a ghost; but, if so, he is a doughty man, because he goes swiftly up to it with a glad smile upon his lips. "My darling girl," he says, in a subdued voice, "I thought you were in the middle of your first happy dream by this." Monica smiles, and leaves her hand in his. "I am not such a lazy-bones as you evidently thought me," she says. "But I must hurry now, indeed. All the world is abed, I suppose; and if Kit wakes and finds me not yet come, she will be frightened." "Before you go, tell me you will meet me somewhere to-morrow. You," uncertainly, "_are_ going home to-morrow, are you not?" "Yes. But--but--_how_ can I meet you? I have almost given my word to Aunt Priscilla to do nothing--clandestine--or that; and how shall I break it? You are always tempting me, and"--a soft glance stealing to him from beneath her lashes--"I should _like_ to see you, of course, but so much duty I owe to her." "Your first duty is to your husband," responds he, gravely. She turns to him with startled eyes. "Who is that?" she asks. "I am," boldly; "or at least I soon shall be: it is all the same." "How sure you are of me!" she says, with just the faintest touch of offence in her tone that quickens his pulses to fever-heat. "_Sure!_" he says, with a melancholy raised by passion into something that is almost vehemence. "Was I ever so _unsure_ of anything, I wonder? There is so little certainty connected with you in my mind that half my days are consumed by doubts that render me miserable! Yet I put my trust in you. Upon your sweetness I build my hope. I feel you would not willingly condemn any one to death, and what could I do but die if you now throw me over? But you _won't I think_." "No, no," says Monica, impulsively, tears in her eyes and voice. Tremblingly she yields herself to him, and let him hold her to his heart in a close embrace. "How could you think that of me? Have you forgotten that I _kissed_ you?" Plainly she lays great stress upon that rash act committed the other night beneath the stars. "_Forget it!_" says Desmond, in a tone that leaves nothing to be desired. "You are mine, then, now,--now and forever," he says, presently. "But there is always Aunt Priscilla," says Monica, nervously. Her tone is full of affliction. "Oh, if she could _only_ see me now!" "Well, she _can't_, that's one comfort; not if she were the hundred-eyed Argus himself." "I feel I am behaving very badly to her," says Monica, dolorously. "I am, in spite of myself, deceiving her, and to-morrow, when it is all over,----" "It shan't be over," interrupts he, with considerable vigor. "What a thing to say!"