‘More, since my sister Nita is in it. There!’ he added, taking his place beside her as she lay down, and gave a long sigh of relief; ‘now tell me what you have been doing this afternoon.’ ‘That you may give one of your favourite lectures, I suppose,’ said Nita, smiling. But by degrees she told him the history of the afternoon’s adventure, while it grew dark within the room, and their voices sank lower, and Mr. Bolton read on, and Miss Shuttleworth’s needles clicked, clicked, as if they went by clockwork. ‘Oh, John! how ashamed I was! I could not look him in the face,’ murmured Nita, at the end of this conversation. ‘Ashamed—of what?’ asked John, in his slow tones, and looking at her with his near-sighted eyes. ‘Of my carelessness, my folly, which so nearly cost him his life!’ ‘And you yours. I tell you what it is, Nita; it must have been a very engrossing conversation that caused you to loose your hold on the ribbons. Is it allowable to ask what it was all about?’ ‘Partly about you,’ replied Nita, surprised into the admission by this sudden appearance in John of an astuteness with which she had not for a moment credited him. ‘About me? What about me?’ She was silent. ‘You won’t say—or can’t. Forgotten, perhaps. I wonder if Wellfield has, too? I’ll ask him.’ ‘He will have forgotten too,’ replied Nita ‘I thought as much,’ said John, and silence fell upon them too. * * * * * Wellfield wandered beside the river into the fields—some broad, pleasant, open fields where the river was wide, and formed a broad, shallow, brawling kind of waterfall. To-night there was a full moon, which, as night fell, replaced the day with a softer brilliance. He mused as he walked, not with the heartbeats and the tumultuous agitation which had shaken Nita, but with vague wonder, and a vague repining. Why had he not known of all this reverse of circumstances a few months earlier, before he had met Sara Ford and learnt to love her? If Sara had not been there, imperiously commanding his love, how easy it would have been to accept Father Somerville’s outspoken counsel, to make love to Nita Bolton (this with a calm obliviousness or ignoring of the fact that what he had done that afternoon was, if not love-making, at least an excellent imitation of it), marry her, and once more enjoy his own. It was now quite impossible, of course, and his little experiment this afternoon had just sufficed to show him that had he only been free, it might have been. He did not wish to be free—not he! Who would wish to be free who was loved by Sara Ford? But surely it was not wrong to picture what might have been if he had never met her. He could not tell her of what might have been; but he wished she could know it—could know what his love for her would stand, what hot temptations, what fiery trials it would carry him through unscathed.