gh; only I did not know it. I must have loved you
since the day I first met you at the ball. You remember it, do you not?
When you first smiled at me I felt that we had always known each other;
and that evening I was content. Will you make me so for all my life?" He
leaned over toward her and tried to take one of her hands; she edged it
away from him, and turned toward him with flashing eyes and thin,
compressed lips.

"It is not possible that I shall ever care for you, Lord Brompton, in
the way in which you pretend to care for me."

"Pretend to care for you!" he said, angrily. "What do you mean by that?
Why should I come to you with pretences? What should I gain by making a
lying love to you?"

"Everything," she answered, coldly.

"I do not care to argue this, Miss Windsor," he said, turning his face
away, pained to the heart. "I am in such a position that I may not; but
I wished, while I had a chance, to tell you that I loved you. Good-by,
Maggie, good-by. I do not wish to be melodramatic; but you may never see
me again."

He kissed one of her hands, which lay at her side, and lifting himself
from the rock, climbed down the cliff, a mist of tears before his eyes;
and Maggie sat looking over the bay silent and sad, trying to reconcile
the evident genuineness of Geoffrey's entreaty with what she knew of
him.

Late that evening Mary Lincoln was sitting in her bedroom, in an
arm-chair by the fire. Her thoughts were of Sir John Dacre.

In him she saw the hero of whom she had dreamed during her girlhood; the
young prince clad in golden armor, and in quest of adventures and
opportunities for self-sacrifice, who should awake her sleeping heart
with a kiss.

The ordinary warm-hearted but pleasure-loving and easy-going man cannot
stir the depths of a nature like Mary Lincoln's. An earnest, ardent
spirit, even if it be Quixotic, so that it see before it, like a clear
flame, some duty to be done, or some war to be waged, attracts to it the
devotion of a strong woman's heart.

Women love adventurous, single-minded men, and will die for them, if
need be, gladly and silently; but such men, intent on their object, seem
oblivious to the wealth of love that might be theirs for the asking,
were they not too absorbed to ask for it. And so it was with John Dacre
and Mary Lincoln. He was drawn to her unconsciously by her lovely
womanhood; but his great dream seemed to fill his mind, and that
fulfilled, the world had nothing in