“No, I guessed it from his manner, and when I found you didn’t come to Llancader, and then I spoke to mamma, and she told me, and said it was no use hoping. Oh, but Rees, I don’t think you can care as much as I do! You--you think more about getting this treasure than about me. I know you do. I know you were angry at my interrupting you. Yes, and I believe you _were_ at work in here, and that it’s only to prevent my finding out something that you are so nice to me now.” She thrust him away from her, noticed the roughness of the fresh-dug earth at her feet, and looked up at him with triumphant suspicion. “Ah!” she cried in a whisper. Rees was seized with a bold idea. “Yes,” he said, “I have been digging here; I have been trying to find the treasure. For if I could show him the way to a little fortune, the earl could scarcely refuse to let me marry you.” Lady Marion, fond of him as she was, had the sense to look doubtful. “And Deborah? They say you like Deborah better than me!” Rees was not past blushing, and he blushed now. “Nonsense!” he said. “Look here, Marion.” Stooping down, he scraped away the loose earth and discovered the grating on which he had built such high hopes. “This is what I found to-night,” said he. “It may be only the covering of an old drain. But it may be something more. At any rate, that is my secret, which I have confided to nobody but you. Is that confidence enough? Now do you believe I care for you?” It was a bold stroke, and he watched the effect in desperate excitement. Lady Marion’s sallow face lighted up with eagerness as great as his own as she looked down at the rusty grating, which, slightly displaced during Rees’s labours, shook under the tread. “But did you do it for me, Rees--really for me?” she asked still half-doubtfully. “If I had not, why should I confide in you? I did not want you to know my aims yet, certainly; I was too much humiliated by your father. But you have found me out, so you may as well know everything. Now, Marion, if ever I get your father to accept me for a son-in-law, will you have me?” The poor affectionate girl was overjoyed. She hung about him, kissed his hands and his hair, and assured him that she would wait ten years for him if a prince were to woo her. She begged him to see her home as far as the park gates, as a compensation for the fact that they would have to be circumspect and content to see each other seldom. It was Rees who, impatient at her demonstrativeness, impressed this upon her. “But I can come and see you at the same place to-morrow evening,” said she. “Mademoiselle de Laval always leaves us quite undisturbed in the evening, and thinks we are busy over our Greek. I can slip out without the least danger. I shall come; don’t be afraid.”