But then I was greatly to blame. The winning ways of the girl, no less than Duke’s persistent deprecation of any affectation of proprietorship in her, are my one excuse. A poor one, even then, for how may I cry out on simple-hearted Dolly, when I failed to read the little history of sorrow that was daily before my eyes. It was after events only that interpreted to me the pride that would not let the cripple kneel, a suitor to pity. As to my own feelings toward the pretty soul I had once so basely linked to my own with an impulsive kiss--they were a compound of indulgence and a tenderness that fell altogether short of love. I desired to be on brotherly terms of intimacy with her, indeed, but only in such manner as to preclude thought of any closer tie. When she was shy with me upon our first meeting after that untoward contact in the lock-house, I laughed her into playfulness and would have no sentimental glamour attaching to our bond of sympathy. Alas! I was to learn how reckless a thing it is to seek to extinguish with laughter the fire of a woman’s heart. One Sunday afternoon in the early autumn of that fourth year, Dolly and I were loitering together about the slopes and byways of Epping forest. There is no season more attuned to the pathetic sympathies of young hearts than that in which the quiet relaxing of green life from its hold on existence speaks only to grayer breasts of premature decay and the vulgar ceremonial of the grave. Youth, however, recognizes none of this morbid aspect. To it the yellowing leaf, if it speaks of desolation, speaks from that “passion of the past” the poets strove to explore. It stands but two-thirds of the way up to the hill of years, and flowering stretches are beneath it to the rear and above, before its eyes, the fathomless sky and the great clouds nozzling the mountain crests like flocks of sheep. All that afternoon as we wandered we came across lizards sprawling stupefied--as they will in October--on buskets of gorse, too exhausted, apparently, to feel the prick of thorn or fear, and butterflies sitting on blades of grass with folded wings, motionless as those that are wired to bonnets. The air was full of a damp refreshing sweetness, and the long grass about every bush and hedge side began to stir with the movement of secret things, as though preparations for mystic revel were toward and invitations passing. I could almost see the fairy rings forming, noiseless, on the turf, when the lonely moon should hang her lantern out by and by. CHAPTER XVIII. A VOICE FROM THE CROWD. Dolly had been unusually silent during the afternoon, and now, as we turned to retrace our steps in the direction of the station from which we were to take train for London, she walked beside me without uttering a word. Suddenly, however, she put her hand upon my arm and stayed me. “Renny,” she said, “will you stop a little while? I want to speak to you.” “All right,” I said; “speak away.”