it_! I shall never absolve you from it, as I
have absolved you from your first promise to-day. Never. Do not hope for
that. Should you live to be a hundred years old, you cannot marry your
cousin without my consent, and that I shall never give. You quite
understand?"

"Quite." But her tone has grown faint and uncertain. What has she done?
Something in his words, his manner, has at last awakened her from the
happy dream in which she was reveling.

"Now you can return to your old lover," says Stephen, with an
indescribably bitter laugh, "and be happy. For your deeper satisfaction,
too, let me tell you that for the future you shall see very little of
me."

"You are going abroad?" asks she, very timidly, in her heart devoutly
hoping that this may be the reading of his last words.

"No; I shall stay here. But the Court I shall trouble with my presence
seldom. I don't know," exclaims he, for the first time losing his
wonderful self control and speaking querulously, "what is the matter
with me. Energy has deserted me with all the rest. You have broken my
heart, I suppose, and that explains everything. There, _go_," turning
abruptly away from her; "your being where I can see you only makes
matters worse."

Some impulse prompts Dulce to go up to him and lay her hand gently on
his arm.

"Stephen," she says, in a low tone, "if I have caused you any
unhappiness forgive me now."

"Forgive you?" exclaims he, so fiercely that she recoils from him in
absolute terror.

Lifting her fingers from his arm as though they burn him, he flings them
passionately away, and, plunging into the short thick underwood, is soon
lost to sight.

Dulce, pale and frightened, returns by the path by which she had come,
but not to those she had left. She is in no humor now for questions or
curious looks; gaining the house without encountering any one, she runs
up-stairs, and seeks refuge in her own room.

But if she doesn't return to gratify the curiosity of the puzzled group
on the rustic-seat, somebody else does.

Jacky, panting, dishevelled, out of breath with quick running rushes up
to them, and precipitates himself upon his mother.

"It's all right," he cries, triumphantly. "He didn't do a bit to her. I
watched him all the time and he never _touched_ her."

"Who? What?" demands the bewildered Julia. But Jacky disdains
explanations.

"He only talked, and talked, and talked," he goes on, fluently; "and he
said she did awful things to h