"Well, come and follow me up with it now, and distract my uncle's
attention if we meet him."

"To _my_ room or yours?" insinuatingly.

"To _mine_," firmly.

"I'd take the greatest care of it, if you like to trust it to me," with
what Kit would certainly have termed "an obliging air."

"I don't doubt you," sardonically. "But certainly _not_. It was given to
me, and I feel myself bound to look after it."

"Pity we can't have it petrified," says Mr. Kelly, thoughtfully. "Then
you might hang it round your neck as a trophy." At this they both laugh,
and finally the trophy, after much difficulty is satisfactorily stored
away.

* * * * *

It is a fortnight later, and desolation has overtaken Monica. Brian has
passed out of her active life, has ceased from that seeing and hearing
and that satisfaction of touch that belong to a daily intercourse with
one beloved. Only in thought can she find him now. He has gone upon that
threatened journey to those detested estates of his in Westmeath.

Yesterday he went; and to-day as she wakes it seems to her that a cold
and cruel mist has wrapped her world in its embrace. We never know how
we prize a thing until we lose it (N. B.--Mark the novelty of this
idea;) and now, for the first time, Monica finds herself fully awake to
the fact of how necessary Desmond is to her everyday happiness.

She had gone down to the river-side to bid him farewell, and had been
calm, almost careless, throughout the interview,--_so_ calm that the
young man's heart dies within him, and a latent sense of hope deferred
had made it sick.

But just at the very last she had given way, and had flung herself into
his embrace, and twined her arms around his neck,--dear, clinging
arms--and had broken into bitter weeping. And--

"Don't be long, Brian! don't be _long_!" she had sobbed, with deep
entreaty, and with such a tender passion as had shaken all her slender
frame.

So they had "kissed and kissed," and parted. And Desmond, though sad as
man may be at the thought that he should look upon her face no more for
four long weeks, still left her with a gladder heart than he had ever
known. Her tears were sweet to him, and in her grief he found solace for
his own.

And, indeed, as the days flew by, they found the pain of absence was
checkered by dreams of the reunion that lay before them; and each day,
as it was born, and grew, and died, and so was laid upon the pile of
those