“Ah!” she said, interrupting him; his excitement roused no alarm in her mind. She was incapable of understanding any meaning in him that was inconsistent with honour. “Would it be so necessary to think of the music?” she said. It seemed to her that for Rollo Ridsdale’s wife it need not be any longer a point essential. A host of other duties, more sweet, more homely, came before her dazzled eyes. “Above all things!” he said, with a sudden panic, “without that what would you--how could I?----“--the suggestion was insupportable--“but we can discuss this after,” he said. “Lottie, my Lottie, listen! Trust yourself to me--let me take you away out of all this misery into happiness. Such happiness! I scarcely can put it into words. Why should you have another day of persecution, when you can be free, if you will, this very night?” His countenance seemed aflame as he bent towards her in the wintry twilight; she could feel the tumultuous beating of his heart. It was no premeditated villany, but a real impulse, acted upon, without any pause for thought, with that sudden and impassioned energy which is often more subtle than the craftiest calculation. Even while his heart beat thus wildly with awakened passion, Rollo answered the feeble resistance of his conscience by asking himself what harm could it do her? it would not interfere with her career. As for Lottie, she raised herself up within his arm and threw back her head and looked at him, not shrinking from him nor showing any horror of the suggestion. There was a pause--only for a moment, but it felt like half-an-hour, while wild excitement, love, and terror coursed through his veins. Surely she understood him, and was not alarmed? If she had understood him and flung away from him in outraged virtue, Rollo would have been abject in guilt and penitence. For the moment, however, though his heart beat with alarm, there was a sense of coming triumph in all his being. Lottie raised her drooping shoulders, she threw back her head and looked at him, into the glowing face that was so close to her. Her heart had given one answering leap of excitement, but was not beating like his. At that moment, so tremendous to him, it was not passion, but reflection, that was in her eyes. “Let me think--let us think,” she said. “Oh, Rollo! it is a great temptation. To go away, to be safe with you----” “My darling, my own darling! you shall never have cause to fear, never to doubt me; my love will be as steady, as true----” So high had the excitement of suspense grown, that he had scarcely breath to get out the words.