"Not quite, I think," exclaims he, the sudden coldness of her manner
frightening him into better behavior. "If--if I have said anything to
offend you, I ask your forgiveness."

"There is nothing to forgive, indeed, and you have failed to offend me.
But," slowly, "you have made me very sorry for you."

"_Sorry?_"

"Yes, for your most unhappy temper. It is quite the worst, I think, I
have ever met with. _Good_-night Mr. Desmond: pray be careful when going
through that hedge again; there are some rose-trees growing in it, and
thorns do hurt so dreadfully."

So saying, she gathers up her white skirts, and, without a touch of her
hand, or even a last glance, flits like a lissome ghost across the
moonlit paths of the garden, and so is gone.

CHAPTER XIII.

How Kit reads between the lines--How the Misses Blake show
themselves determined to pursue a dissipated course, and how Monica
is led astray by an apt pupil of Machiavelli.

Early next morning Bridget, Monica's maid, enters Kit's room in a
somewhat mysterious fashion. Glancing all round the room furtively, as
though expecting an enemy lying in ambush behind every chair and table,
she says, in a low, cautious tone,--

"A letter for you, miss."

As she says this, she draws a note from beneath her apron, where, in her
right hand, it has been carefully hidden,--_so_ carefully, indeed, that
she could not have failed to create suspicion in the breast of a babe.

"For me," says Kit, off her guard for once.

"Yes, miss."

"Who brought it?"

"A bit of a gossoon, miss, out there in the yard beyant. An' he wouldn't
give me his name; but sure I know him well for a boy of the Maddens',
an' one of the Coole people. His father, an' his gran'father before him,
were laborers with the ould Squire."

"Ah, indeed!" says Kit. By this time she has recovered her surprise and
her composure. "Thank you, Bridget," she says, with quite a
grandiloquent air: "put it there, on that table. It is of no
consequence, I dare say: you can go."

Bridget--who, like all her countrywomen, dearly likes a love-affair, and
is quite aware of young Mr. Desmond's passion for her mistress--is
disappointed.

"The gossoon said he was to wait for an answer, miss," she says,
insinuatingly. "An' faix," waxing confidential, "I think I caught sight
of the coat-tails of Misther Desmond's man outside the yard gate."

"You should never think on such occasions, Bridget; and coat-tails are
decid