elt as if I should go mad. Think of
it! There was I, all those thousands of miles away, with all that money
in my possession, and you, the queen of my heart, the girl I loved
better than life itself, in poverty and perhaps wanting a friend!" He
was silent a moment, and Ida felt him shudder as if he were again
tasting the bitterness of that moment.

"When I had taken my passage," he went on, succinctly, "I sent Henry up
to the run to fill my place, and with him a letter to explain my sudden
departure; and the next day, Heaven being kind to me--I should have
gone out of my mind if I had had to wait--we sailed. I stood at the
bow, with my face turned towards England, and counted the days before I
could get there and begin my search for you."

"And you came here, Stafford, first?" she said, to lead him on: for
what an unspeakable bliss it was to listen to him!

"Yes; I knew that I should hear some tidings of you here. There would
be a lawyer, a steward, who would know. I little thought, hoped, to see
you yourself, Ida. I came from the station to-night to look at the old
place, to walk where we had walked, to stand where we had stood. I
stopped under the trees here and looked at the house, at the terrace
where I had seen you, watched for you. I could see that men had been at
work, and I thought that you had sold the place, that the new people
were altering it, and I cursed them in my heart; for every stone of it
is sacred to me. And then, as I stood looking, and asking myself where
you were, the dogs came. Even then it did not occur to me that you were
still here--at the Hall--and when I saw you--"

He stopped, and laughed shortly, as a man does when his emotion is
almost too much for him.

"I'd made up my mind what to write to you; but, you see, I'd had no
thought, no hope, of seeing you; and now--ah, well, it's hard to think
of anything, with you in my arms! But see here, Ida, there isn't any
need to say anything, is there? You'll come back with me to that new
world--"

What was it, what word in the tender, loving speech that, like a breath
of wind sweeping away a mountain mist, cleared the mist from her mind,
woke her from her strange, dream-like condition, recalled the past,
and, alas! and alas! the present!

With a low cry, a cry of anguish--one has heard it from the lips of a
sufferer waking from the anodyne of sleep to fresh pain--she tore
herself from his arms, and with both hands to her head, stood regarding