nged."

"To-night," she whispered, clasping his arm in nervous terror. "Come
back with me and tell her to-night; then I shall feel sure, and not
as if it was not real. And when you have told her,--before whoever
may be there, remember,--go home; do not stop to listen to anything
she may say."

They drove slowly back, and went up the steps to the house, from which
voices and laughter came, hand in hand, like two children; but they were
children no longer when they crossed the threshold and saw Monty Bell in
the group that loitered with Mrs. Latham in the reception hall, waiting
for dinner to be announced.

Sylvia's thin gown was wet with dew, her hair was tossed about, her eyes
big with excitement, and a red spot burned in each cheek in startling
contrast to her pallor--all of which gave her a wild and unusual beauty
that absolutely startled as well as shocked her mother, letting her think
for a second that Sylvia was going to make a scene, had gone mad,
perhaps, and run away, and that the tall man holding her by the hand had
found her and brought her home.

Taking a few hasty steps forward, and dreading anything disagreeably
tragic, she said: "Mr. Bradford, I believe. What is it? What has
happened?"

"Only this, that Miss Sylvia has promised to be my wife, and that, as her
mother, we have come to tell you of it before I go home to tell my own."
Horace Bradford drew himself up to every inch of his full height as he
spoke, bowed to Mrs. Latham, then led Sylvia to the foot of the stairs,
saying, "Until to-morrow," and walked quietly out of the house.

No one spoke. Then Mrs. Latham, choking with rage, feeling herself
helplessly at bay (Sylvia was of age, and she could not even assume
authority under the circumstances), collapsed on a divan in modified
hysterics, and Monty Bell, completely thunderstruck, finally broke the
silence by his characteristic exclamation, "I'll be damned!"

* * * * *

After their belated supper, when Esther Nichols had gone over to a
neighbour's, Horace, sitting by his mother's side, out in the
honeysuckled porch, where the sphinx moths whirred like humming-birds of
night, holding her hands in his, told her all. And she, stifling the
mother pain that, like a birth pang, expected yet dreaded, must come at
first when the other woman, no matter how welcome, steps between, folded
his hands close, as if she held him again a baby in her arms, and said,
smiling thr