Slowly they paced about the moss-grown paths. Once she stumbled, and he enquired breathlessly if she would take his arm. What wondering bliss when she agreed; how that strong arm of his thrilled under the light pressure! What a sweet, sweet, brief dream it was! All too brief, indeed, for while they yet wandered side by side among the sunlit green a shrill voice was heard calling from the house, and Lucy, withdrawing her hand from his arm, gave a little impatient sigh. “They are calling me; I must go in.” “Wait a moment,” cried John peremptorily; his voice was hoarse, his eyes seemed to burn in his pale face, “let us part here, since we must part.” She, too, had grown pale; but, after a moment’s pause, seemed to struggle against the contagion of his emotion. “Pooh,” she said, with a little jarring note in her voice, “who knows? After all we may meet yet. Some folks say the world is a small place.” “No, no,” he cried fiercely, “’tis you, yourself, who have said it, madam. You go out of my life this day; my one hour is wellnigh over, but a moment of it remains. Let it at least be full; give me something to remember it by.” Trembling in spite of herself, she looked at him, as much in earnest now as he: “What would you have?” she said almost in a whisper. “This?” She detached one of the roses from her nosegay and held it out to him with shaking fingers. “I would have more, madam,” he cried, and, bending, took both her hands in his and kissed them many times with a vehemence which startled her. “Good-bye,” she said, and her slight form wavered like a reed, “good-bye, poor John, dear John, try to think well of me always. And now, let me go.” But John had fallen on his knees in the green bower, and his face, as he uplifted it, seemed bright with a kind of white radiance. “Oh, love,” he cried in a broken whisper, “love, stoop to me!” He drew her gently towards him, and she did not resist, and they kissed each other shyly, tenderly, wonderingly, as the first man and woman may have kissed beneath the blossoming trees of Eden. Then the shrill cry came nearer, and there was a sound of pattering feet, and in a moment she was gone, and John Cotley was left alone to awake from his dream. * * * One week after the events which had so disturbed the placid current of John Cotley’s life, that unwise young gentleman might have been discerned making his way into Sadler’s Wells Play-house amid a crowd of more seasoned play-goers.