"Oh no, don't ask me. After this, I daren't stand the strain of seeing you again--at least not just now--not so very, very soon. Please, please, don't ask me. Go to-morrow, as you said. If you don't, I can't let you," she blushed, and held out her blushing face once more. "Only if you promise me to go to-morrow, mind," she said, with a half-coquettish, half-tearful smile at him. Cyril hesitated for a second. He was inclined to temporize. "Those are very hard terms," he said. Then impulse proved too much for him. He bent forward, and pressed his lips just once on that olive-brown cheek. "But I may come back again very soon," he murmured, pushing home his advantage. Elma seized his hand in hers, wrung it hard and tremulously, and then turned and ran like a frightened fawn, without pausing to look back, down the path homeward. Yet she whispered one broken sentence through her tears, for all that, before she went. "I shall love you always; but spare me, spare me." And Cyril was left behind by himself in the wood, completely mystified. CHAPTER XVI. STRUGGLE AND VICTORY. Elma hurried home full of intense misgivings. She dreaded having to meet her mother's eye. How on earth could she hide from that searching glance the whole truth as to what had happened in the wood that morning? When she reached home, however, she learned to her relief, from the maid who opened the door to her, that their neighbour, Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve, the distinguished Q.C., had dropped in for lunch, and this chance diversion supplied Elma with a little fresh courage to face the inevitable. She went straight up to her own room the moment she entered the house, without seeing her mother, and there she waited, bathing her face copiously till some minutes after the lunch bell had rung. For she felt sure she would blush crimson when she met her mother; but as she blushed habitually when strangers came in, the cause of it might thus, perhaps, she vainly flattered herself, escape even those lynx-like eyes of Mrs. Clifford's.