oung people when the Duke
had intercepted her lover. Even that delay she had thought was hard.
The discreet maid opened the door of the little drawing-room,--and
discreetly closed it instantly. "At last!" she said, throwing herself
into his arms.

"Yes,--at last."

On this occasion time did not envy them. The long afternoons of
spring had come, and as Tregear had reached the house between four
and five they were able to go out together before the sun set.
"No," she said when he came to inquire as to her life during the
last twelve months; "you had not much to be afraid of as to my
forgetting."

"But when everything was against me?"

"One thing was not against you. You ought to have been sure of that."

"And so I was. And yet I felt that I ought not to have been sure.
Sometimes, in my solitude, I used to think that I myself had been
wrong. I began to doubt whether under any circumstances I could have
been justified in asking your father's daughter to be my wife."

"Because of his rank?"

"Not so much his rank as his money."

"Ought that to be considered?"

"A poor man who marries a rich woman will always be suspected."

"Because people are so mean and poor-spirited; and because they think
that money is more than anything else. It should be nothing at all
in such matters. I don't know how it can be anything. They have been
saying that to me all along,--as though one were to stop to think
whether one was rich or poor." Tregear, when this was said, could not
but remember that at a time not very much prior to that at which Mary
had not stopped to think, neither for a while had he and Mabel. "I
suppose it was worse for me than for you," she added.

"I hope not."

"But it was, Frank; and therefore I ought to have it made up to me
now. It was very bad to be alone here, particularly when I felt that
papa always looked at me as though I were a sinner. He did not mean
it, but he could not help looking at me like that. And there was
nobody to whom I could say a word."

"It was pretty much the same with me."

"Yes; but you were not offending a father who could not keep himself
from looking reproaches at you. I was like a boy at school who had
been put into Coventry. And then they sent me to Lady Cantrip!"

"Was that very bad?"

"I do believe that if I were a young woman with a well-ordered mind,
I should feel myself very much indebted to Lady Cantrip. She had a
terrible task of it. But I could not teach myself