s towards him,--"my dearest Philip, my life, my
love, I will marry you when you will."

"To-morrow?"

"To-morrow, if you like!"

"You must promise me something first."

"What is it?"

"That you will keep the marriage a complete secret, and bear another
name until my father's death. If you do not, he will most probably
disinherit me."

"I do not like your terms, Philip. I do not like secret marriages; but
you are giving up much to marry me, so I suppose I must give up
something to marry you."

"You solemnly promise that nothing shall induce you to reveal that you
are my wife until I give you permission to do so?"

"I promise--that is, provided you do not force me to in self-defence."

Philip laughed.

"You need not fear that," he said. "But how shall we arrange about
getting married?"

"I can meet you in London."

"Very well. I will go up early to-morrow, and get a licence, and then
on Wednesday I can meet you, and we can be married."

"As you will, Philip; where shall I meet you?"

He gave her an address which she carefully noted down.

"Now," she said, "you must go, it is late. Yes, you may kiss me now.
There, that will do, now go." In another minute he was gone.

"I have won the game," she mused; "poor Maria. I am sorry for her, but
perhaps hers is the better part. She will get over it, but mine is a
sad fate; I love passionately, madly, but I do not trust the man I
love. Why should our marriage be so secret? He cannot be entangled
with Maria, or she would have told me." And she stretched out her arms
towards the path by which he had left her, and cried aloud, in the
native tongue that sounded so soft upon her lips, "Oh, my heart's
darling! if I could only trust you as well as I love you, it is a
happy woman that I should be to-night."

CHAPTER VII

Nothing occurred to interfere with the plan of action decided on by
Hilda and Philip; no misadventure came to mock them, dashing the
Tantalus cup of joy to earth before their eyes. On the contrary,
within forty-eight hours of the conversation recorded in the last
chapter, they were as completely and irrevocably man and wife, as a
special licence and the curate of a city church, assisted by the clerk
and the pew-opener, could make them.

Then followed a brief period of such delirium as turned the London
lodgings, dingy and stuffy as they were in the height of the hot
summer, into an earthly paradise, a garden of Ede