cook has it ready for me. Will you come with me,
Monica? _Do._"

"Not to-day, I think," says Monica, lazily.

"I wish you would! I do so _hate_ going anywhere by myself. And,
somehow, I am half afraid to go alone to-day, I feel--so--so faint.
However," with a resigned sigh, "never mind; I dare say if I _do_ drop
in a deadly swoon, somebody will pick me up."

"My dear Kit, if you feel like that, don't go," says Monica, naturally
alarmed.

"I have promised old Mrs. Daly; I must go," replies Kit, with the
determination of a Brutus. "If I am not back in time for dinner, you
will understand what has happened."

This is awful! Monica turns quite pale.

"Of course I shall go with you," she says, hurriedly. "Is your head so
very bad, darling? How bravely you carried it off in there!" pointing
towards the morning-room they have just left. "However, it would be only
like you to hide your worries from us, lest they should make us
unhappy."

At this, it must be allowed to her credit, Kit feels some strong twinges
of remorse,--not enough, however, to compel confession.

"It is really hardly worth talking about," she says, alluding to the
headache; and this, at all events, is the strict truth.

CHAPTER XIV.

How Kit's plot is betrayed, and how a walk that begins gayly ends in
gloom.

The road to Mrs. Daly's is full of beauty. On one side of it runs Coole,
its trees rich with leafy branches; upon the other stretches a common,
green and soft, with a grand glimpse of the ocean far down below it.

"Why walk on the dusty road when those fields are green in there?" says
Kit, pointing to Coole; and, after a faint hesitation, Monica follows
her over the wall and into the dark recesses of the woods. The grass is
knee deep in ferns and trailing verdure; great clumps of honeysuckle,
falling from giant limbs of elm, make the air sweet. Some little way to
their right--but where they cannot see because of the prodigality of
moss and alder and bracken--a little hidden brook runs merrily, making

"Sweet music with th' enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage."

Some thought belonging to the past night coming to Kit, she turns to
Monica with a little laugh.

"How silent you have been about last night's adventure!" she says. "I
watched you from your own window until the shadows caught you. You
looked like a flitting spirit,--a--a bhoot."

"A _boot_!" says Monic