"Yes, I suppose so. How long"--he dropped his voice--"is Mrs. Carleton going to remain here? Do you know?" "Not I. How should I? Mrs. Darling and Rose leave tomorrow." There was a pause. He held out his arm to Georgina, and began slowly to pace the terrace with her. She looked very fair, very lovely in the moonlight. "How came Mrs. Carleton to prolong her stay beyond that of her mother and sister?" "As if I knew! Sir Isaac pressed it, I think I heard him say to her one day that as Mrs. St. John intended to spend the winter at Castle Wafer, she could not do better than promise him to remain also. Don't you like her?" "Not very much, I think." "I did like her. I cannot tell you how much I pitied her. It seems so hard a fate to lose her husband and her two children, and now to have lost Alnwick. But she won't let me like her; she is so very distant with me; repellant might be the better word; and so I think she is making me _dis_like her. I like Rose." He laughed. "No one can help liking Rose; with all her faults she is open as the day. Do you know, Georgina, I used at times to think Rose very much like you." "In face?" "No. And yet there may be a certain resemblance even there: both of you are fair, and both--pretty. You need not fling away from me as if it were treason to say so. But I meant in manner. You were once as wild as Rose is now." "You saw a great deal of her this time last year, did you not, when she was staying with Adeline de Castella?" "Yes," he laconically answered. Georgina Beauclerc turned to the terrace railings, and leaned over them, looking far away. He stood by her side in silence. "Do you think I am wild in manner now?" she presently asked. "No; you have greatly changed." "Those old, old days in Westerbury--and I know I _was_ wild in them--have faded away as a dream. It seems so long ago!--and yet, marked by the calendar, it is only a short time. One may live years in a few months, Mr. St. John." With the privileged freedom of his boyhood he turned her face towards him, and saw what he had suspected. The blue eyes were filled with tears. "What is it, child?" "Nothing. Past days are often sad to look back to." "Do you know that you _have_ changed--wonderfully changed?" "From my wildness? Yes, I think I have been tamed." "And what has tamed you?" "Oh,"--there was a slight pause--"nothing but my own good sense." "And now please tell me why you call me Mr. St. John. You have been doing it all the week." The tears vanished, and a slight smile parted the pretty lips. "You are Mr. St. John now." "Not to you, I should have thought." "I remember the lecture you once gave me for calling you Fred." "No doubt. I gave you little else than lectures then; some of them in earnest, some in fun. The lecture you speak of was of the latter description." "I know how vexed you used to pet with me. You must have hated me very much."