He was holding her hand close, and through both their frames electric currents seemed to tingle. The very air about them was charged with electricity to them, so that both were quivering and excited. They were standing near the open door, when suddenly Stella turned, laid her two small hands lightly upon Hilary’s sleeve, and looked up in his face, her own pale, but transfigured into more than its usual loveliness by passionate feeling. “Was it only a dream?” she breathed rather than said. “Or do you love me?” Mortal man could hold out in pride no longer. In an instant he had gathered her up in his arms, and was covering her cheeks, her eyes, and her lips with close, hot kisses, while he murmured incoherent words of love into her ear. Only for one mad, never-to-be-forgotten moment did he hold her thus, she unresisting, clinging timidly to him, letting her soft lips meet his in answering passion. Then he remembered all the difference between them, all the barriers, all the impossibilities. As in a flash he realized her father’s wrath, her mother’s astonishment, and the indignation of his loyal friend, Lord Carthew, and leading Stella gently to the door, he kissed her hands in token of farewell. “Good-by,” he whispered. “I will write.” Then he shut the door, and finding herself alone in the corridor, dazed and agitated, Stella fled to her own room, and kneeling down before an arm-chair by the fire, buried her face in her hands, to enact in imagination the scene again which she had just gone through, to thrill with ecstasy as she recalled Hilary’s kisses, to blush until her delicate skin seemed scorched as she remembered her own timid response, and to long with every fibre of her being for the moment when she would see him again. She knew full well now what even to herself she would not own, she hardly understood before, that from the moment when that man of superb figure and perfect face had laid his hand upon Zephyr’s bridle on the preceding evening, and looked into her eyes, she had loved him, and that but for that she would hardly have braved her father’s anger by insisting upon Hilary’s removal to the Chase.