Lottie ran out while Rollo Ridsdale was getting his hat to accompany her home. She caught up her shawl over her arm without pausing to put it on, and ran through the dark Cloister and across the Dean’s Walk to her own door, before he knew she was ready. “The young--lady is gone, sir,” Mr. Jeremie said, who was rather indignant at having to open the door to such sort of people. He would have said young woman had he dared. Rollo, much piqued already in that she had refused to sing for him further, and half irritated, half attracted by this escapade now, hurried after her; but when he emerged from the gloom of the Cloister to the fresh dewy air of the night, and the breadth of the Dean’s Walk, lying half visible in summer darkness in the soft indistinct radiance of the stars, there was no one visible, far or near. She had already gone in before he came in sight of the door. He looked up and down the silent way, on which not a creature was visible, and listened to the sound of the door closing behind her. The flight and the sound awoke a new sentiment in his mind. Ladies were not apt to avoid Rollo. Not his the form nor his the eye That youthful maidens wont to fly. He was piqued and he was roused. Heretofore, honestly, there had been little but music in his thoughts. The girl was very handsome, which was so much the better--very much the better, for his purpose; but this sparkle of resistance in her roused something else in his mind. Lottie had been like an inspired creature as she sang, this evening. He had never seen on the stage or elsewhere so wonderful an exhibition of absorbed impassioned feeling. If he could secure her for his prima donna, nowhere would such a prima donna be seen. It was not that she had thrown herself into the music, but that the music had possessed her, and transported her out of herself. This was not a common human creature. She was no longer merely handsome, but beautiful in the fervour of her feeling. And for the first time Lottie as Lottie, not merely as a singer, touched a well-worn but still sensitive chord in his breast. He stood looking at the door, which still seemed to echo in the stillness with the jar of closing. What did her flight mean? He was provoked, tantalised, stimulated. Whatever happened, he must see more of this girl. Why should she fly from him? He did not choose to return and tell the story of her flight, which was such an incident as always makes the man who is baulked present a more or less ridiculous aspect to the spectators; but he stood outside and waited till the steps of the Minor Canon and the Signor had become audible turning each towards their habitation, and even the turning of Mr. Ashford’s latchkey in his door. Everything was very still in the evening at St. Michael’s. The respectable and solemn Canons in their great houses, and the old Chevaliers in their little lodges, went early to bed. Rollo saw no light anywhere except a dim glow in the window of the little drawing-room