"I wasn't thinking of the dog either," she replied. With her hand still in John Musgrave's she walked to the parapet and sat down. Mr Musgrave seated himself beside her, and, gaining courage from the contact of the warm hand lying so confidingly in his own, he felt emboldened to proceed with his avowal of love. "My feeling for you, Miss Annersley, is as unchangeable as it is deep. It has developed so imperceptibly that, until you went away, and I realised how greatly I missed you, what a blank in my days your absence made, I never suspected how dear you were becoming to me. When I suspected it I was distressed, because it seemed to me incredible that you, young and beautiful and so greatly admired, could ever entertain for me any kinder feeling than that of friendship. I can scarcely believe even now that you feel more than friendship for me. I must appear old to you, and my ideas are old-fashioned, and, I begin to see now, intolerant." "Not intolerant," Peggy corrected. "If I wasn't confident that your heart is so kind, and your sympathies so wide, that it will be as easy for you to give and take as for me to meet you in this respect, I should be afraid to risk the happiness of both our futures. But I haven't any fears at all. I think I have loved you from the moment when you met me weeping in the road, and took charge of Diogenes." "That," he said a little doubtfully, "is gratitude." She shook her head. "No," she insisted, "it is something more enduring than that." At which interesting point in the discussion, to John Musgrave's annoyance, a shrill scream penetrated the stillness, and Mrs Chadwick's voice was heard exclaiming in accents of astonishment and delight: "Oh, Diogenes, Diogenes, dear old fellow!... Wherever did you come from? And how did you get your coat in that horrible mess?" Diogenes, finding it slow on the terrace, had sauntered into the drawing-room and discovered himself to Mrs Chadwick. Peggy glanced swiftly into the face of the man beside her and laughed happily, and John Musgrave, finding to his vast amazement the laughing face held firmly between his two hands, bent his head suddenly and kissed the curving lips. It is possible that could he have looked back into the days before he knew Peggy he would have failed to recognise as himself the man who, in response to the vicar's assertion that occasionally people married for love, had made the shocked ejaculation: "Do they, indeed?" John Musgrave was learning. CHAPTER THIRTY. The Rev Walter Errol, removing, his surplice in the little vestry at the finish of one of the simplest and most pleasing ceremonies at which he had ever been required to officiate, looked forth through the mullioned window to watch his oldest and best-loved friend passing along the gravelled path in the sunlight with his bride upon his arm.