"She," said Lady St. Craye, "was frightened away from her life's happiness, as they call it, by seeing you rather near to a pink silk model. I suppose you think _I_ shouldn't mind such things?" "You forget," said Vernon demurely. "Such things never happen after one is married." "No," she said, "of course they don't. I forgot that." "You might as well marry me," he said, and the look of youth had come back suddenly, as it's way was, to his face. "I might very much better not." They looked at each other steadily. She saw in his eyes a little of what it was that Betty had taught him. She never knew what he saw in hers, for all in a moment he was kneeling beside her; his arm was across the back of her chair, his head was on her shoulder and his face was laid against her neck, as the face of a child, tired with a long play-day, is laid against the neck of its mother. "Ah, be nice to me!" he said. "I am very tired." Her arm went round his shoulders as the mother's arm goes round the shoulders of the child. THE END.