"No, no!" I answered, keeping them by a desperate exertion of strength. "I shall never forgive you if you stop the horses." "I shall never forgive myself for the danger I have brought you in," he said, in a low tone. "You will never trust yourself to my protection again, I fear," he continued earnestly, as we drove into the park gate. "Oh, I'm not afraid as long as I hold the ribbons," I answered, trying to laugh, but drawing a freer breath as we cleared the woods and came into the moonlight again. "You are cruel," he said, in a lower tone still. "There's the house at last!" exclaimed Ellerton, with a sigh of relief so profound that we both started. "How are you getting on, behind there?" asked Victor. "I'd forgotten all about you, Ellerton. That was a neat little compliment from our friend in the woods, now wasn't it? But the least said about those little attentions the better, I've always found; you understand. 'Oh no, we never mentions him,' under any circumstances." "Of course not," said Ellerton, acquiescently. "I should not speak of it on any account." "And, Michael, my man," continued Victor, putting his hand in his pocket, "whist's the word about this little adventure, you know." Michael touched his hat, and, pocketing the coin that Victor tossed him, promised absolute silence on the subject. The horses, as we came up the avenue, slackened their pace, and gave us time to look around. Sunset, starlight moonlight, had neither of them abdicated the bright June sky, but all combined to light up the picture for us, and make the lake a sheet of silver, and the dark, old house as fair as it could be made. "A fine old place, indeed," said Victor, with a temporary shade of seriousness on his face. "It must be pleasant to have such an ancestral home as that. These Rutledges are a high family, are they not?" "One of the very best in the State;" answered Ellerton, feeling that "family" was always a toast to which he was called upon to respond. "There are very few in the country who can go back so far. The Rutledges have always been very exclusive, and held themselves very high, and so have never lost their position." "Ha!" said Victor, with a little darkening of the brow. "That's the style, is it? Our host, then, is a proud man, I am to understand--one who values birth, and that sort of thing, and plumes himself upon it, and regards with a proper scorn all who have come into the world under less favorable auspices than himself." "Exactly," said Ellerton. "I think that's Rutledge exactly. He's what you'd call a regular aristocrat, and proud as Lucifer himself." "I kiss his hand!" cried Victor, with a dash of bitterness in his tone. "Commend me to such a man as that! I reverence his largeness of soul, his nobility of nature! I long to show him in what esteem I hold him."