"Ella!"

"Oh, my dear, I don't mean anything dreadful. Only, you know as well as
I do that a healthy man and a healthy woman will never talk, when they
are alone together, about God, when they can talk about each other. I
think Herbert Courtland is about the healthiest man I know, and I'm
sure that you are the healthiest girl. You and he are most sympathetic
companions. You are not at all stupidly coy, my sweet maiden."

"I like Mr. Courtland, and why should I be coy?"

"Why, indeed? I wonder what the people who have just left us will say
about it?"

"About it? About what!"

"You coyness--or absence of coyness. Will they say that you threw
yourself at his head?"

(As a matter of fact, as is already known, that is just what the
majority of the guests did say about her.)

Phyllis reddened and seemed--for a moment or two--almost angry. Then she
made a little gesture, expressive of indifference, as she cried:

"After all, what does it matter what they said? I don't care about them.
It is for you I care, Ella--you, only you."

"Heavens! how seriously you say that!" cried Ella. "There's no cause for
seriousness, I hope, even if you do care a great deal for me, which I
know you do. If you said so much to a man,--say, Herbert Courtland,--it
would be quite another matter. There would be sufficient cause for
seriousness then. But you didn't say so much to him. He ran away before
you could say it."

"Oh, Ella! please don't talk in that way. It is not like yourself to
talk in that way."

"How do you know what is like myself and what is not? You have only seen
one side of me, and I don't think that you have understood even what you
have seen. Great Heavens! how could I expect that you should. Not until
within a few months ago had I myself any idea that my nature was made
up of more than one element. Do you fancy now that you will always be in
the future as you have been in the past? The same placid, sweet English
girl, with serious thoughts at times about your own soul and other
people's souls? a maiden living with her feet only touching the common
clay of this earth? Wait until your hour comes--your hour of love; your
hour of fate; your hour of self-abandonment, and pray to your God that
you may come through it as well as I came through mine."

"Ella, dearest Ella!"

"You know nothing of that hour--that terrible hour! Wait until it comes
to you before you think a word of evil against any woman that lives in
the