"You cannot help me; no one can help me," sobbed Maggie, as her friend put her arm around her waist, and gently stroked her hair. "It is only that I love him so, and he is unworthy of it." "Do you mean Geoffrey Ripon?" asked Mary. "Yes, yes." "Geoffrey Ripon unworthy of a woman's love!" exclaimed Mary. "That cannot be. John Dacre--" She blushed and turned away her face, that Maggie might not see her as she spoke his name. "John Dacre says that he is the soul of honor and his life-long friend." "Oh! men have such different ideas of honor from ours," exclaimed Maggie. Then she told her friend in broken speech of her love for Geoffrey; that she had supposed that he had not told her he loved her because he felt that he had nothing to offer her; that she had come to England to see him again; and then she told of the dreadful scene in Chichester, and how she had coldly rejected him in the morning because she believed he loved Eleanor Carey, and that he wished to marry for money. The story seemed shameful to her as she told it: her forwardness in coming to England, and her shattered faith in her lover. "And yet he seemed in earnest this morning, and he appeared to love me," she said to Mary, when she had told her story, "and when I told him, when he asked me what he had to gain by a pretence of loving me, that he had everything to gain, his face was deadly white and his eyes were filled with tears. Oh, I almost believed in him then, and I should have relented; I fear I should have been weak enough to have relented if he had not left me; and now it is all over!" She burst into tears, and Mary's face was full of sympathy, as she whispered words of comfort in the unhappy girl's ear. "I own that appearances are against him," she urged, "but they may be explained away. Mrs. Carey is a very dangerous and bad woman; at the moment when Geoffrey appeared to you the worst he may have loved you the most. Have heart, dear, if he loves you, and if he is a good and true man, as I think he must be, for John Dacre trusts him--" Maggie raised her head, looked into her friend's eyes and read her secret. Then two hands clasped together tightly, and they kissed and wept together. "You will see him again," whispered Mary, as Maggie was leaving the room. "You will see him soon, and everything will be right." "No, I am afraid everything will not," said Maggie; "but if I have lost a lover, I have found a friend, have I not?" And they did not meet soon again, for Geoffrey was dispatched by Dacre upon most important duty--to make arrangements for the concealment of the King when he should arrive in the country to return to his own again. He went into the enterprise heart and soul; that is to say, with that part of his heart which was left him. Still he feared the end of the affair, and seemed to foresee the ruin to which the troubled waters in which he swam were sweeping the King's men. CHAPTER X. KING GEORGE THE FIFTH.