honour, she knew not how, of the man she was to marry. Yet her frank soul rebelled against the deception. The hour of Roderick's departure was to be kept secret; her elopement with him not to be whispered of. She was to give out a journey to Ayresford, to escape from the painful associations of the house in Pont Street, filled with all the vain preparations for the morrow. She had never lied barefacedly in her life, and for a moment she hated Roderick for compelling her to falseness. But then the lingering echoes of his voice hummed in her ears, and the blood rushed back into her cheeks, and she felt strong for the sacrifice of her honour. Did she love him? She answered the self-put question with a passionate affirmative. Else why was she doing this preposterous thing? Was not the blindness of her trust the very banner of her love? A phrase of Roderick's crossed her mind. “Life is merely the summation of moments of keen living.” She caught at it as a plank with the drowning man's thrill. She was living keenly; that alone was sufficient to justify everything. She was defying the set uses of the tame world. “Each man must batter down for himself the doors that hide life's inner glory” was another of his sayings. Was she not even now battering at the door? Her soul clutched at every supporting straw. Yet, in spite of these aphoristic comforts, it was with a strange, dull sense of fatality that she saw herself sitting by Roderick's side in the train that night, being carried away further and further into the inscrutable darkness. ***** The first part of her task was over. She had told Lady Milmo. It had been an interview of pain and self-reproach. Lady Milmo had gasped, wept, waxed indignant. All her kindly woman's motherliness had poured itself out upon the girl, whom she considered infamously treated. It was in vain for Ella to plead the matter of life and death that called Roderick away. Lady Milmo had her prejudices. She had cordially approved of Ella's immediate retirement to Ayresford. How could the poor child stay in the house where every surrounding would be a pain to her? She had sent Ella off to lie down in peace upon her own bed, away from the half-packed litter of finery in the girl's room; and while Ella lay there with a splitting headache, helplessly counting the slow hours, Lady Milmo sat heroically before her writing-table immersed in lists and telegraph forms.