He asked her to tell him. A slight shudder ran through her, and she shook her head mournfully, no word escaping her lips. She sighed, the sigh of a young girl who had a burden of apprehension upon her sorely troubled mind. He could scarcely believe that this was the bright, happy, laughing girl who, half an hour ago, had been putting her stones along the ice, wielding her besom with all her might, and clapping her dainty little hands with delight when any of her own side knocked an opponent off "the pot lid." At last, after long persuasion, during which time dusk had almost deepened into darkness in that silent snow-covered wood, she, in a faltering voice, and with many sentences broken by her emotion, which she vainly strived to suppress, told him a most curious and startling story to which he listened with breathless interest. The first of the series of remarkable incidents had occurred about two years ago, while she was at school in Versailles. She, with a number of other elder girls, had gone to spend the summer at a branch of the college close to Fontainebleau, and they often succeeded, when cycling, in getting away unobserved and enjoying long runs in the forest alone. One summer's evening she was riding alone along a leafy by-way of the great forest when, by some means, her skirt got entangled in the machine and she was thrown and hurt her ankle. A rather well-dressed Frenchman who was coming along assisted her. He appeared to be very kind, gave her a card, with the name "Paul Berton" upon it, was told her name in response, and very quickly a friendship sprang up between them. He was an engineer, and staying at the Lion d'Or, in Fontainebleau, he said, and having wheeled her machine several miles to a spot quite near the college, suggested another meeting. She, with the school-girl's adventurous spirit, consented, and that proved to be the first of many clandestine rendezvous. She was not quite seventeen while he was, she thought, about twenty-six. She kept her secret from all, even from her most intimate schoolmate, fearing to be betrayed to the head governess, so all the summer these secret meetings went on, she becoming more and more infatuated on every occasion, while he, with apparent carelessness, learned from her the history of her family, who they were, and where they resided.