At last Precious grew frightened at her own silence. She felt so strangely, her cheeks burned, her heart beat heavily in the stillness, her lips seemed glued together. Suddenly he spoke, but without turning his glance from the mountains: "Pardon my silence. I must seem very dull to you. I was trying to hear the river say your word 'Regret.'" And before she could answer he added: "Do you know Miss Ingelow's poem 'Regret?'" She answered in a low voice, with a deepening flush: "Yes, I found it once in a book of mamma's, heavily underlined. It begins like this: "'Oh, that word Regret! There have been nights and morns when we have sighed, Let us alone, Regret.'" "Ugh! it gives me the dismals!" he groaned, and she paused diffidently. That strange, throbbing silence fell again, and frightened her. It was like some mesmeric spell. She cried out quickly: "Let us go up to the house." Her broad leghorn sun-hat lay on the grass and she stretched out her arm for it. A terrible shriek followed. In the soft green grass beneath the broad brim of the hat a deadly rattlesnake had lain coiled. At her disturbing touch it reared its evil head and struck its fangs into her arm. Lord Chester saw it all, and with a loud cry sprang forward, setting his heel on the serpent's head ere it could strike the second blow. It writhed hideously for a moment, then lay still in death. Precious had fallen back, deathly pale and half unconscious, against the tree. He fell on his knees beside her and cried out tenderly: "Do not be frightened, my darling. I will suck the poison from the wound." And he placed his lips on the tiny wound on her slender wrist and with desperate fervor drew forth the fatal venom, spitting it again and again on the ground. When he felt that the danger was removed, he looked up at her and saw that her eyes wore closed in apparent unconsiousness. With uncontrollable love he clasped her in his arms and kissed the cold white lips, sobbing: "My love! my darling!" CHAPTER XVII. "HAD I BUT MET YOU FIRST." "But cruel fate that shapes our ends, Dark doom that poet love attends, The fate unhappy Petrarch sung In fair Italia's burning tongue; Such fate as reckless tears apart The tendrils of the breaking heart, From every prop where it would twine, That cruel fate, alas, is mine, For love of you!" --MRS. ALEX. MCVEIGH MILLER. Lovers and poets rave of voices so dear and sweet that they can call one back almost from the borders of the grave. Perhaps there is some little truth in those romantic ravings. Precious Winans had been lying back as mute and still as some marble image of a dead maiden, but those frenzied caresses, those sobbing whispers, "My love! my darling!" sent the warm blood bounding sweetly through her veins once more and her eyes opened with a dazed expression.