o the cushion of her chair.

The firs mounting high into the sky, stand out boldly against their
azure background. Fabian, in answer to Julia's touch of affectation,
advances with more haste, and says:

"It is only me," in his usual clear, slow voice.

Passing by Portia's chair, he drops into her lap a little bunch of dark
blue flowers.

"Ah!" she says quickly, then checks herself. Taking up the deeply-dyed
blossoms, she lays them in her pink palm, and, bending her face over
them, examines them silently. Sir Mark, regarding her curiously from the
background, wonders whether she is thinking of them or of their donor.

"Why, those are the flowers we were talking about," says Dulce, with a
faint contraction of her brows. "Fabian! Did you risk your life to get
them?"

"Your life!" says Portia, in an indescribable tone, and as if the words
are drawn from her against her will. I think she had made up her mind to
keep utter silence, but some horror connected with Dulce's hasty remark
has unbound her lips. She turns her eyes upon him, and he can see by the
moonlight that her face is very white.

"My dear fellow," says Sir Mark, "you grow more eccentric daily. Now
this last act was rashness itself. That cliff is very nearly impassable,
and in this uncertain light--"

"It was the simplest thing in the world," says Fabian, coldly. "There
was the ledge Dulce told you of, and plenty of tough heather to hold on
by. I assure you, if there was the smallest danger, I should not have
attempted it. And, besides, I was fully rewarded for any trouble I
undertook. The view up there to-night is magnificent."

To Portia it is an easy matter to translate this last remark. He is
giving her plainly to understand that he neither seeks nor desires
thanks from _her_. The view has sufficed him. It was to let his eyes
feast upon the glorious riches nature had spread before him that led him
up the mountain-side, not a foolish longing to gratify her whim at any
cost to himself.

She looks at the flowers again, and with one tapered finger turns them
over and over in her hand.

"Well, good people," says Sir Mark, rising to his feet, "as it is eleven
o'clock, and as the dew is falling, and as you are all plainly bent on
committing suicide by means of rheumatism, neuralgia and catarrhs
generally, I shall leave you and seek my virtuous couch."

"What's a catarrh?" asks Dicky Browne, confidentially, of no one in
particular.

"A cold in your n