your voice. Do you remember telling the story of Thibaut
Rossignol?"

"Oh yes, yes!"

"Is he still with your father?"

"Thibaut? Why, Thibaut is an institution. I can't imagine our house
without him. Do you know that he always calls me Mademoiselle Irene?"

"Your name is beautiful in any language. I wonder how many times I have
repeated it to myself? And thought, too, so often of its meaning;
longed, for _that_--and how vainly!"

"Say the name--now," she faltered.

"Irene!--Irene!"

"Why, you make music of it! I never knew how musical it sounded. Hush!
look at that thing of light and air!"

The dragon-fly had flashed past them. This way and that it darted above
the shining water, then dropped once more, to float, to sail idly with
its gossamer wings.

Piers stole nearer. He sat on a stone by her side.

"Irene!"

"Yes. I like the name when you say it."

"May I touch your hand?"

Still gazing at the dragon-fly, as if careless of what she did, she
held her hand to him. Piers folded it in both his own.

"May I hold it as long as I live?"

"Is that a new thought of yours?" she asked, in a voice that shook as
it tried to suggest laughter in her mind.

"The newest! The most daring and the most glorious I ever had."

"Why, then I have been mistaken," she said softly, for an instant
meeting his eyes. "I fancied I owed you something for a wrong I did,
without meaning it, more than eight years gone by."

"That thought had come to you?" Piers exclaimed, with eyes gleaming.

"Indeed it had. I shall be more than half sorry if I have to lose it."

"How foolish I was! What wild, monstrous folly! How could you have
dreamt for a moment that such a one as I was could dare to love
you?--Irene, you did me no wrong. You gave me the ideal of my
life--something I should never lose from my heart and mind--something
to live towards! Not a hope; hope would have been madness. I have loved
you without hope; loved you because I had found the only one I could
love--the one I must love--on and on to the end."

She laid her free hand upon his that clasped the other, and bowed him
to her reasoning mood.

"Let me speak of other things--that have to be made plain between you
and me. First of all, a piece of news. I have just heard that my
brother is going to marry Mrs. John Jacks."

Piers was mute with astonishment. It was so long since he had seen Mrs.
Jacks, and he pictured her as a woman much older than Eustace Derwent.
H