"Why, Mr. Foley, where have you been hiding yourself for this last half-hour? You only appear to make yourself invisible. Baron Meiffenheim has been singing the most enchanting little German ballad, and I so much wished you to hear it. I know you like that kind of music." "I like it so well that I am going up the Danube on purpose to hear it," answered Philip bravely. "Good-night, Miss Crawford; good-night and--good-bye." He laid a solemn emphasis on the last two syllables, and suffered the little hand he had taken to fall suddenly from his loose grasp. Flo had been an accomplished coquette from the date of her thirteenth birthday, and was accustomed to heart-rending farewells; and yet she felt just one little pang as those solemn syllables fell upon her ear. It would have been so much more pleasant if the landscape-painter had waited to witness her triumphs, and to be excruciated by her fascinations, when she had entered the lists of bewitching matrons as Mrs. Thomas Lobyer. The steamer left St. Katharine's Dock for Rotterdam at noon on the following day, and on Monday night Philip Foley sat on the raised deck of the vessel smoking a cigar, and looking dreamily down at the phosphoric light upon the waves dashing past him with an eager palpitating motion, as if--or so it seemed to Philip--each silvery wavelet had been hurrying madly towards the English shore to kiss the feet of Florence Crawford. "There's not a boat goes by us but seems to my mind to be sailing towards her, while I am going away," thought the despondent lover. He was sorry that he had accepted the painter's kindness. He was sorry that he had pledged himself to become an exile from the land in which he had enjoyed the privilege of making himself supremely miserable for love of Florence Crawford. CHAPTER XVIII. TOO LATE FOR REPENTANCE. After considerable parley, and much supplication on the part of the devotee Mr. Lobyer, it had been arranged that Miss Crawford's marriage should take place on the last day of June; and for a period of six weeks prior to that date the painter found his home a place of confusion and his life a conflict.