, I will leave you here, for a little trot about the country,
and meet you again at this spot at the end of thirty minutes. I cannot
resist the temptation to have a little chat with you on the way home,"
Ray returned, and, with another fond pressure of the hand, he leaped
again upon his horse and galloped away.

With a rapidly beating heart and flushed cheeks, Mona hurried on her way.
She made her purchases with all possible dispatch, then, as she had a few
minutes to spare, she slipped into a hot-house, where flowers were
cultivated for the city market, and bought a bunch of white violets, and
a few sprays of heliotrope, then she turned her footsteps back toward
Hazeldean.

She had hardly reached the spot where she had parted from Ray, when she
heard him coming in the distance.

He joined her in another moment, and springing from the saddle, he threw
the bridle-rein over his arm and walked beside her, leading his horse.

They had not proceeded far when they came to a place where another road
appeared to branch off from the road they were on.

"Let us turn here," Ray said. "I have been exploring while you were in
the village, and I found that this is a kind of lane, hedged on either
side with a thick growth of pines, and leads back to the main road
farther on. It is a little roundabout, but we shall not be likely to meet
any one whom we know, and we shall feel far more freedom."

Mona was very glad to adopt this plan, and wandering slowly along beneath
the shadows of the heavy pines, the lovers soon forgot that there was any
one else in the world except themselves.

They talked over more fully the incidents of the weeks of their
separation, but Ray dwelt a good deal upon the story of the stolen
diamonds, and Mona could not fail to observe that he was very much
troubled about the affair.

"It is a great loss," he remarked, with a sigh, "and though I cannot feel
that I am culpably blamable, yet I do not cease to reproach myself for
having been so thoroughly fooled by that woman. If I had only retained my
hold upon the package, she never could have got it."

"But you may recover the diamonds, even now," Mona remarked. "You say
that the detective arrested a woman on Friday evening as the suspected
party."

"Yes, he suspects her in connection with another case, which he has been
at work upon for over three years," and Ray related the story of the
stolen crescents, then continued: "At the Delmonico ball he saw this