hursday you shall be my wife--not his!"

"Norry! Norry!" more loudly this time, called the voice of Aunt Hetty,
still in the doorway, "where on earth is the child?"

"Let me go--let me go!" Norine cried in terror, "she will be here
directly."

"You will meet me to-morrow night, promise first?"

"Yes--yes--yes! Only let me go."

He obeyed. Retreating into the shadow of the trees, he watched her glide
out in the moonlit path, and up to the gate. He heard her ascend the
steps, and then Aunt Hetty's voice came to him again.

"Goodness gracious, child! where have you been? Do you want to get your
death, out in your bare head and the dew falling like rain?"

He could not catch Norine's faint reply. A second more, and again Miss
Hester Kent was shrilly to be heard.

"Land of hope! whatever ails you. Norry? You are whiter than the dead.
Oh, I know how it will be after to-night--you'll be laid up for a week."

He heard the house door close. Then he was alone with the rustling
trees, and the bright, countless stars. As he stepped out into the
crystal radiance, his face shone with exultant delight--alas! for
Norine! _not_ with happy love.

"I knew it!" he thought to himself in his triumph; "I knew I could take
her from him at the very church door. Now, Richard Gilbert! whose turn
is it at last--who holds the winning trump in the game? You have
baffled, and foiled, and watched me many a time, notably in the case of
Lucy West--when it came to old Darcy's ears through you, and he was
within a hair's breadth of disinheriting me. Every dog has his day.
Yours is over--mine has come. The wheel has revolved, and Laurence
Thorndyke, gambler, trickster, libertine, as you paint him, is at the
top. You have not spared me in the past, my good Gilbert, look to
yourself now, for by all the gods I'll not spare you!"

While Mr. Thorndyke, with his hat pulled low over his brows, walked home
to the obscure hotel at which he chose to stop, Norine was up in her
room alone with her tumultuous heart. She had complained of a headache
and gone at once. The plea was not altogether false--her brain was
whirling, her heart throbbing in a wild tumult, half terror, half
delight. He had come back to her, he loved her, she was going to be his
wife! For over an hour she sat, hiding even in the dusk her happy face
in her hands, with only this one thought pulsing through all her
being--she was to be his wife!

By and by she grew calm and able to think