imax has come. Like her
father, he, too, prefers Dorian,--nay, by his tone, casts a slur upon
Horace. The implied dislike cuts her bitterly to the heart.

"What evil thing have you to say of Horace," she goes on, vehemently,
"that you so emphatically declare in favor of Dorian? When you are
with him you profess great friendship for him, and now behind his back
you seek to malign him to the woman he loves."

"You are unjust," says Scrope, wearily. "I know nothing bad of Horace.
I merely said I wished it had been Dorian. No, I have nothing to say
against Horace."

"Then why do you look as if you had?" says Miss Peyton, pettishly,
frowning a little, and letting her eyes rest on him for a moment only,
to withdraw them again with a deeper frown. "Your manner suggests many
things. You are like papa--" She pauses, feeling she has made a false
move, and wishes vainly her last words unsaid.

"Does your father disapprove, then?" asks he, more through idleness
than a desire to know.

Instinctively he feels that, no matter what obstacles may be thrown in
this girl's way, still she will carry her point and marry the man she
has elected to love. Nay, will not difficulties but increase her
steadfastness, and make strong the devotion that is growing in her
heart?

Not until now, this moment, when hope has died and despair sprung into
life, does he know how freely, how altogether, he has lavished the
entire affection of his soul upon her. During all these past few
months he has lived and thought and hoped but for her; and now--all
this is at an end.

Like a heavy blow from some unseen hand this terrible news has fallen
upon him, leaving him spent and broken, and filled with something that
is agonized surprise at the depth of the misfortune that has overtaken
him. It is as a revelation, the awakening to a sense of the longing
that has been his,--to the knowledge of the cruel strength of the
tenderness that binds his heart to hers.

With a slow wonder he lifts his eyes and gazes at her. There is a
petulant expression round her mobile lips, a faint bending of her
brows that bespeaks discontent, bordering upon anger, yet, withal, she
is quite lovely,--so sweet, yet so unsympathetic; so gentle, yet so
ignorant of all he is at present feeling.

With a sickening dread he looks forward to the future that still may
lie before him. It seems to him that he can view, lying stretched out
in the far distance, a lonely cheerless road, over