e little
monkey's narrative! Perkins, like a soldier as he was, utterly impassive
to all surrounding circumstances, shouldered a valise and dashed at
quick march after his luckless master; Justine clapped her plump
French-gloved fingers with a million ma Fois! and mon Dieus! and O
Ciels! and far away in the gray distance sped the retreating figure of
poor Belle, with the license in one pocket and the wedding-ring in the
other, flying, as if his life depended on it, from the shame, and the
misery, and the horror of that awful sell, drawn on his luckless head by
that ill-fated line in the _Daily_.

While Belle drove to his hapless wooing, Fairlie galloped on and on.
Where he went he neither knew nor cared. He had ridden heedlessly along,
and the Grey, left to her own devices, had taken the road to which her
head for the last four months had been so often turned--the road leading
to Fern Chase,--and about a mile from the Vane estate lost her left
hind-shoe, and came to a dead stop of her own accord, after having been
ridden for a couple of hours as hard as if she had been at the Grand
Military. Fairlie threw himself off the saddle, and, leaving the bridle
loose on the mare's neck, who he knew would not stray a foot away from
him, he flung himself on the grass, under the cool morning shadows of
the roadside trees, no sound in the quiet country round him breaking in
on his weary thoughts, till the musical ring of a pony's hoofs came
pattering down the lane. He never heard it, however, nor looked up,
till the quick trot slackened and then stopped beside him.

"Colonel Fairlie!"

"Good Heavens! Geraldine!"

"Well," she said, with tears in her eyes and petulant anger in her
voice, "so you have never had the grace to come and apologize for
insulting me as you did last week?"

"For mercy's sake do not trifle with me."

"Trifle! No, indeed!" interrupted the young lady. "Your behavior was no
trifle, and it will be a very long time before I forgive it, if ever I
do."

"Stay--wait a moment."

"How can you ask me, when, five days ago, you bid me never come near you
with my cursed coquetries again?" asked Geraldine, trying, and vainly,
to get the bridle out of his grasp.

"God forgive me! I did not know what I said. What I had heard was enough
to madden a colder man than I. Is it untrue?"

"Is what untrue?"

"You know well enough. Answer me, is it true or not?"

"How can I tell what you mean? You talk in enigmas. Let me