"I will see you here, in this place, to-morrow night." "At what hour?" "As soon as dusk comes on. Say seven." "You will not fail, Mary Anne?" "Fail!" she repeated, vehemently. Then, in a quieter tone, as she would have walked away, "No; I will be sure to come." Robert Hunter grasped her hand, as if to draw her towards him for a fond embrace, but Miss Thornycroft wrenched her hand away with a half cry, and went on to join her brother. "Good night, dear Robert," she presently called out, in a gentle voice, as if to atone for her abrupt movement: but oh! what a mine of anguish that voice betrayed! In the midst of the same silence that they had come, they went back again, walking side by side in the road, but not touching each other. Ah! what anguish it was that lay on both of them! We never know; in great affliction we are so apt to think that we can bear nothing worse, and live. It had seemed to Richard Thornycroft and his sister, when they went down to the churchyard, that no heavier weight of misery could be theirs than that lying on them; it seemed now in going back, as if that had been light, compared with this. "Richard," she whispered, in her great pity, as they passed through the entrance gates of the Red Court Farm, "he is better off; he was fit to go. You know it must be so. Cyril is in heaven with God; it seems now as if he had been living on for it." Richard hardly heard the words. He was thinking his own thoughts. "The death must have been a painless one." She was true to her promise. The following evening, when dark fell and before the moon was up, Robert Hunter and Miss Thornycroft sat once more in the church porch. The night was very cold, sharp, raw; but from a feeling of considerate delicacy, which she understood and mentally thanked him for, he was without a great-coat. He rightly judged that the only one he had with him could in her eyes be nothing but an object of horror.