I like the morning, it is so blithe. Will eight in the morning do,
Alonzo?"

"The loveliest hour in the day--since it will make you mine."

There was a feeble but frantic sound for some little time, as if
wool-lipped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah
said, "Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am
called to meet it."

The young girl sought a large parlor and took her place at a window
which looked out upon a beautiful scene. To the left one could view the
charming Nuuana Valley, fringed with its ruddy flush of tropical flowers
and its plumed and graceful cocoa palms; its rising foothills clothed
in the shining green of lemon, citron, and orange groves; its storied
precipice beyond, where the first Kamehameha drove his defeated foes
over to their destruction, a spot that had forgotten its grim history,
no doubt, for now it was smiling, as almost always at noonday, under the
glowing arches of a succession of rainbows. In front of the window one
could see the quaint town, and here and there a picturesque group of
dusky natives, enjoying the blistering weather; and far to the right lay
the restless ocean, tossing its white mane in the sunshine.

Rosannah stood there, in her filmy white raiment, fanning her flushed
and heated face, waiting. A Kanaka boy, clothed in a damaged blue
necktie and part of a silk hat, thrust his head in at the door, and
announced, "'Frisco haole!"

"Show him in," said the girl, straightening herself up and assuming a
meaning dignity. Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley entered, clad from head to
heel in dazzling snow--that is to say, in the lightest and whitest of
Irish linen. He moved eagerly forward, but the girl made a gesture and
gave him a look which checked him suddenly. She said, coldly, "I am
here, as I promised. I believed your assertions, I yielded to your
importune lies, and said I would name the day. I name the 1st of
April--eight in the morning. NOW GO!"

"Oh, my dearest, if the gratitude of a lifetime--"

"Not a word. Spare me all sight of you, all communication with you,
until that hour. No--no supplications; I will have it so."

When he was gone, she sank exhausted in a chair, for the long siege of
troubles she had undergone had wasted her strength. Presently she
said, "What a narrow escape! If the hour appointed had been an hour
earlier--Oh, horror, what an escape I have made! And to think I had come
to imagine I was loving this beguilin