“Oh, you must not, you shall not, give yourself so much pain for this vile liar, whoever it is. Have some mercy on me, if not on yourself. I can’t endure to see you so distressed--it breaks my heart. I have loved you too long, too devotedly----” He paused abruptly; he had not intended to broach the subject thus, to put his fate to the touch while she was hardly herself, overwhelmed by the agony of some poignant, covert grief which he could not share. Surely this was not the moment to decide the course of his future life and hers. He had had his grave misgivings as to her preference. She was joyous and lovely, and sweet and congenial to many alike who basked in the radiance of her charm. She was the reigning belle of the winter, and doubtless her relatives entertained high ambitions as to her settlement in life. Since the loss of Duciehurst from his material hopes and prospects he had scarcely felt himself justified in asking her to share his restrictions and limited resources. He lived on the look in her eyes, a chance word among all the others, and he had not had hope enough, encouragement enough of her preference to urge his suit upon her. He felt as if he stood in an illumination of heaven and earth when she turned her face suddenly, and asked: “How long?” He had both her little hands in his when he strove to differentiate for her just when and how he first recognized the unfolding of this flower of love to irradiate his life with bloom and fragrance and then to urge upon her some word of promise to set his plunging heart at rest. Her face, all fluctuating with happy smiles and flushes, grew affectedly grave as she seemed to consider. “I am not much like a parched flower,” she said, “but I have been waiting some time for this dewdrop.” “Oh, if I had only known, how much I could have saved myself,” exclaimed Randal, voicing the sentiment of many an accepted lover. “I expected this--remark--of yours,” she declared, her blue eyes archly glancing, “at the De Lille reception--’way back, ’way back in the Middle Ages, when you said in such an impassioned voice, ‘Will you--will you have some more frappé?’” Then they both laughed out joyously, and her father in the library, turning over the journal in his hand to get at the river news, had a vague realization of the instability of the moods of women and especially of girls, and was pleased that Hildegarde had recovered her equanimity since her tiff against Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, as he interpreted it, had induced her to forego her charming springtide outing.