by a thrill of pain: the pang of secrecy, the sharp sting of falsehood--falsehood which was abhorrent to Lily’s nature. She had laughed as other girls laugh at the stratagems of lovers, their devices to escape the observation of jealous parents, the evils that are said to be legitimate in love and war. Nobody is so severe as to judge harshly these aberrations from duty. Even the sternest parent smiles at them when they are not directed against himself. But when it came to inventing a story day by day; when it came to deceiving Katrin, with her sharp eyes, at one end, and Helen’s unsuspicious soul at the other--then Lily could not bear the tangled web in which she had wound herself. She had to go on; it was too late to tell the truth now, she had said to herself, day by day, her heart aching from those thanks which Helen showered upon her for her kind attendance upon the unexpected guest. “If it had not been for you, Lily, what could I have done?” the minister’s daughter had said, again and again; and Lily’s heart had grown sick in the midst of her strained and painful happiness at Ronald’s side. Now this was over and another phase come. She had urged him to go, feeling the position untenable any longer in a way which his robust self-confidence had not felt; but when suddenly he had taken the step she urged, Lily felt herself flung back upon herself, the words taken out of her mouth, and the meaning from her mind. All her little fabric of life tumbled down about her. Those habits which are formed so quickly, which a few days suffice to bind upon the soul like iron, dropped from her, and she felt as if the framework by which she was sustained had broken down, and she could no longer hold herself erect. Her life seemed suddenly to have lost all its meaning, all its occupations. There was no sense in going on, no reason for its continuance merely to eat meals, to take walks, to go to bed and to get up again. She looked behind her, to the immediate past, with a pang, and before her, to the immediate future, with a blank sense of vacancy which was almost despair. When the “geeg” that carried him away was gone quite out of sight, Lily went slowly back to the drawing-room, and seated herself at the window from which she had first seen him appearing across the moor. It had been then all ablaze with the heather, which now had died away into rustling bunches of dead flowers, all dried like husks upon the stalks, gray and dreary, like the dull evening of a glowing day. Her heart beat dull with the reverberation of all those convulsions that had gone through it. And now they were all over, like the glow of the heather--and what was before her? The winter creeping on, with its short days and long nights; storm and rain, when even Rory would not face the keen wind; solitude unbroken for weeks and months; and beyond that what was there to look forward to? Oh, if it had been but poverty--the little flat under the roofs in a tall Edinburgh house,