"Cousin Anne--oh, darling! you must pray for me," said Margaret Fanshawe. "I thought it could never be; I thought I knew myself, but all _that_ is vain: there is another will above us--Fate--Eternal Fate, and I am where I am, I know not how." "Why, Margaret, darling, it is what I have been longing for--the very best thing that could have happened; you ought to be the happiest girl in the world," urged Miss Anne Sheckleton, cheerily. "No, darling; I am not happy, except in this, that I know I love him, and would not give him up for all the world; but it seems to me to have been, from first to last, a fatality, and I can't shake off the fear that lies at my heart." "Hush, dear--I hear wheels, I think," said Miss Sheckleton, listening. Margaret was pre-occupied, and did not listen. I don't think she cared much at that moment who came or went, except that one to whom her love was now irrevocably given. "No; I can't hear--no; but he will be here immediately. We must not be out, you know; he may ask for me, and he is so--so very--what shall I say?" Margaret did not mind. She turned a wild and plaintive look upward towards the struggling moon--now emerging, now lost again. "Come, darling--let us go," said Margaret. And she looked round her gently, as if awaking from a dream. "Yes, darling, come," she continued, placing her hand on Anne Sheckleton's arm. "And you are not to tease yourself, Margaret, dear, with fancies and follies. As I said before, you ought to be one of the happiest girls in existence." "So I am," she answered, dreamily--"very happy--oh! wonderfully happy--but there is the feeling of something--_fatal_, as I said; and, be it what it may, let it come. I could not lose him now, for all the world." She was looking up, as she spoke, towards the broken moonlight, herself as pale, and a strange plaintive smile of rapture broke over her beautiful face, as if answering the smile of a spirit in the air. "Come quickly, darling, come," whispered Miss Sheckleton, and they walked side by side in silence to the house, and so to Margaret's room, where she sat down by the window, looking out, and kind Anne Sheckleton sat by the table, with her thin old hand to her cheek, watching her fondly, and awaiting an opportunity to speak, for she was longing to hear a great deal more. CHAPTER XII. CLEVE VERNEY HAS A VISITOR. SO Cleve Verney returned direct to England, and his friends thought his trip to Paris, short as it was, had done him a world of good. What an alterative and tonic a little change of air sometimes is!