It was strange, he thought, that they should both feel thus. “I regret that anything should have occurred to make you so unhappy,” he returned. “I hoped while you were the guest of my mother that nothing would transpire to mar the pleasure of any one. But,” he added, more cheerfully, “you must not allow that farce to oppress you thus. I do not, as I have said before, approve of making light of such serious things, and marriage, to me, seems like a sacred ordinance. But no harm was done, I trust; our friends were amused for a half hour; and really, Miss Richards,” he concluded, smilingly, “if, when you come to be married in earnest, you make as charming a bride as you did to-night, the happy man will be one to be envied.” “_Don’t_, Lord Carrol,” Josephine cried out, in a sharp tone of pain, and laying her hand appealingly on his arm; “_don’t_ say such things to me!” She was trembling like a leaf, and he saw that she was terribly excited, while the piteous tone in which she had just spoken went directly to his kind heart. He took her hand and drew it under his arm. “You are nervous,” he said, kindly. “Come and walk with me a few moments until you are calmer—the night is almost like summer—then I will take you back to the company.” His tone was so sympathizing, his touch on her arm so gentle, while it thrilled every fiber of her body, that it was more than she could bear. She was going to-morrow, and this man whom she loved with a passion almost amounting to idolatry, would be beyond her reach. She would not meet him again for months, perhaps never, and this thought, added to her other pain, broke her down completely. She grasped his arm with both her white hands, her heart was beating like a frightened bird’s, there was a choking sensation in her throat, and bowing her graceful head upon her clasped and trembling hands, she burst into a fresh fit of weeping, which was like a tempest. The young lord found himself in a very awkward position. Those shaking hands, that bowed head lying so near his heart, that lithe, quivering form, those tears and sobs, told him but too plainly what caused this deep emotion. “Miss Richards—Josephine,” he said, unwittingly using her first name in his embarrassment, “let me take you in. You will make yourself ill. What can I do for you?” But she could not control herself. She had abandoned herself too entirely now to her passion to conquer it readily, and she sobbed on, conscious only of how she loved him, and that she was near him. Oh! if he could but have returned her love, she would gladly have given the best years of her life. There was no sacrifice too great, she thought at that moment, for her to make in exchange for the prize she wished to win. “What can I do for you, my friend?” he asked again. “_Love me!_” burst most unconsciously from her trembling lips.