A gong sounding in the distance rouses them from their contented dreaming. "I must go and tell Hermia," she says, starting to her feet: "that is the dressing-bell." "You won't let her influence you against me?" "Nobody could do that." She moves away from him, and then runs back to him again and lays her arms round his neck. "You are more to me now than Hermia and _the world_!" she says, softly. Yet presently, when she finds herself in Hermia's calm presence, her courage somewhat fails her. It is not that she for a moment contemplates the idea of having to give up her lover, but she is afraid of her cousin's cold disparagement of both him and her. "I have just promised to marry Ulic," she says, plunging without preface into her story, with a boldness born of nervous excitement. "To _marry_ him! Why, I thought you looked upon him as a mere boy! Your 'baby,' you used to call him." "Probably that is why I have accepted him. A baby should not be allowed to roam the world at large without some one to look after him." "Do you love him, Olga?" "Yes, I do," says Olga, defiantly. "You may scold me if you like, but a title _isn't_ everything, and he is worth a dozen of that cold, stiff Rossmoyne." "Well, dearest, as you have given him the best part of you,--your heart,--it is as well the rest should follow," says Mrs. Herrick, tenderly. "Yes, I think you will be very happy with him." This speech is so strange, so unexpected, so exactly unlike anything she had made up her mind to receive, that for a moment Olga is stricken dumb. Then with a rush she comes back to glad life. "'Do I wake? do I dream? are there visions about?'" she says. "Why, what sentiments from _you_! You have 'changed all that,' apparently." "I have," says Hermia, very slowly, yet with a vivid blush. Something in her whole manner awakes suspicion of the truth in Olga's mind. "Why," she says, "you don't mean to tell me that----Oh, no! it can't be true! and yet----I verily believe you have----_Is_ it so, Hermia?" "It is," says Hermia, who has evidently, by help of some mental process of her own, understood all this amazing farrago of apparently meaningless words. There is a new sweetness on Mrs. Herrick's lips. One of her rare smiles lights up all her calm, artistic face. "After all your vaunted superiority!" says Olga, drawing a deep sigh. "Oh, _dear_!" Then, with a wicked but merry imitation of Mrs. Herrick's own manner to her, she goes on!-- "You are throwing yourself away, dearest. The world will think nothing of you for the future; and you, so formed to shine, and dazzle, and----" "_He_ will be a baronet at his father's death," says Mrs. Herrick, serenely, with a heavy emphasis on the first pronoun; and then suddenly, as though ashamed of this speech, she lets her mantle drop from her, and cries, with some tender passion,----