“Ah! that is quite different,” said Lottie. “You are rich, or, at least, you are the same as if you were rich; but we are really poor, we have no money: and everything we have, it is papa’s. I suppose he has a right to do whatever he likes with it; it seems strange, but I suppose he has a right. And, then, what is to become of us? How could I be so silly as not to think of that before? It is all my own fault; don’t think I am finding fault with papa, Mr. Ridsdale. I suppose he has a right, and I don’t want to grumble; it only--seems natural--to tell you.” Lottie did not know what an admission she was making. She sighed again into that soft distant horizon, then turned to him with a smile trembling about her lips. It was a relief to tell him--she could speak to him as she could not speak to Captain Temple or Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, though she had known them so much longer. “Perhaps I am only out of temper,” she said. She could not but feel more light of heart standing beside him with nobody near; they seemed to belong to each other so. “How good, how sweet of you to say so,” he cried. “Then treat me as if it were natural; come and sit down--nobody will interrupt us--and tell me everything I want to know.” They had met together in Lottie’s little drawing-room before, in the eye of day, and three or four times under Lady Caroline’s eye; but never before like this, in the twilight, all alone in the world, as it were, two of them, and no more. Lottie hesitated for a moment; but what could be wrong in it? There was nobody to disturb them, and her heart was so full; and to talk to him was so pleasant. She seemed able to say more to him than to any other. He understood her at half a word, whereas to the others she had to say everything, to say even more than she meant before they saw what she meant. She sat down, accordingly, in the corner of the seat, and told him all that had happened; herself beginning to see some humour in it as she told the story, half laughing one moment, half crying the next. And Rollo went into it with all his heart. All their meetings had produced their natural effect; for the last fortnight he had felt that he ought to go away, but he had not gone away. He could not deprive himself of her, of their intercourse, which was nothing yet implied so much, those broken conversations, and the language of looks, that said so much more than words. Never, perhaps, had his intercourse with any girl been so simple, yet so unrestrained. If the old Captain sometimes looked at him with suspicion, he was the only one who did so; and Lottie had neither suspicion nor doubt of him, nor had any question as to his “intentions” arisen in her mind. She told him her grief now, not dully, with the heavy depression that cannot be moved, but with gleams of courage, of resolution, even of fun, unable to resist the temptation of Polly’s absurdity, seeing it now as she had not been able to see it before. “I never knew before,” she said fervently, “what a