‘I’m afraid it’s the only answer I can give you,’ said Laura, with a saucy smile, rising in her turn, and gliding past her companion. ‘Don’t be absurd; and don’t be unkind or disagreeable when we meet again, after we come back from our tour. Good-bye.’ He stood, looking after her, without saying another word. And she, turning when she reached the French window, and seeing him still standing there, waved her hand to bid him adieu, before she disappeared. END OF VOL. I. BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. Transcriber’s Note: This book was written in a period when many words had not become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged. Misspelled words were not corrected. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Those in bold are surrounded by equal signs, =like this=. Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of the chapter. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, extraneous, or partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added.