road they would return, and he made his way to an overhanging bank, screened by trees and a thick hedge, close to which they must pass. He wanted to see them again, although he knew well that the sight would only add to his wretchedness. At length the landau appeared in sight. Hubert parted the boughs carefully and peered through his leafy screen. Miss Winter and Mrs. Carlyon sat together, with Conroy on the opposite seat. Hubert's eyes devoured them. Conroy was leaning forward and talking to Ella, on whose face rested a brightness and animation such as Hubert had not seen there since her uncle's death. A minute later, and a turn of the road hid them from view. Hubert paced about in his rage, and at length walked back to the Hall, a still more miserable man than he had left it. His heart was a prey to the direst thoughts. Love, hatred, jealousy, and despair swayed him by turns, one mood alternating swiftly with another. Had it been a moonless midnight instead of an August evening, and had Edward Conroy and he met by chance in some lonely spot, one of the two would never have left that spot alive. Lights blazed from the windows of one of the smaller drawing-rooms now generally made use of, which had been re-furnished. It was yet empty, dinner not being over. Two gentlemen had been invited to meet Mr. Conroy--the Vicar and Philip Cleeve. Into this lighted drawing-room went Hubert: he knew not why. He felt like a man who was being urged forward by some unseen power towards a goal of which as yet he was but dimly conscious, but from which no exercise of his own will could turn his footsteps aside. Lost in a reverie, he did not hear the ladies approach until it was too late to escape. On the impulse of the moment he hid himself behind the folds of the heavy velvet curtains that shrouded the deep embrasures of the windows. The guests soon followed them. Mrs. Carlyon and the Vicar settled down to a game of backgammon, Philip amused himself with a book of photographs and a magnifying glass, and Ella, at Conroy's request, sat down at the piano, he hovering round her the while and turning over her music. From his hiding-place Hubert could see nothing, but nearly all the conversation, especially that which took place at the piano, was audible to him, and this latter was all that he cared to hear. At times Conroy was so close to him that by stretching out his hand he could have touched him. He stood there as immovable as if cut in stone, with white face and passion-charged eyes, listening to the soft words of his rival, and to the still softer accents that responded to them. Yet the words themselves were commonplace enough; it was the hidden something in their tone that lent them their sweet significance. If Hubert Stone had expected to overhear any lover-like confidences, in which people who are trembling on the verge of the great confession are sometimes wont to indulge, he was mistaken.