've got it here. It's marked, too."

He opened it, to close it instantly--not, however, before she had put
out her hand and laid it, palm down, on the page. "That rose! Oh, let me
have it!"

"Never!" he protested. "Look here. When I put it between the leaves, I
did so at random. I didn't see till now that I had opened it at a marked
passage."

"Let us read it," she said.

He leaned and held the leaf to the light from the doorway and the two
heads bent together over the text.

A sound fell behind them and both turned. A slight figure, in a soft
gray gown with old lace at the throat, stood in the doorway behind them.
John Valiant sprang to his feet.

"Ah, Shirley, I thought I heard voices. Is that you, Chilly?"

"It's not Mr. Lusk, mother," said Shirley. "It's our new neighbor, Mr.
Valiant."

As he bent over the frail hand, murmuring the conventional words that
presentations are believed to require, Mrs. Dandridge sank into a deep
cushioned chair. "Won't you sit down?" she said. He noticed that she did
not look directly at him, and that her face was as pallid as her hair.

"Thank you," said John Valiant, and resumed his place on the lower step.

Shirley, who had again seated herself, suddenly laughed, and pointed to
the book which lay between them. "Imagine what we were doing, dearest!
We were reading _Lucile_ together."

She saw the other wince, and the deep dark eyes lifted, as if under
compulsion, from the book-cover to Valiant's face. He was startled by
Shirley's cry and the sudden limp unconscious settling-back into the
cushions of the fragile form.

CHAPTER XXVIII

NIGHT

A quicker breeze was stirring as John Valiant went back along the Red
Road. It brushed the fraying clouds from the sky, leaving it a pale
gray-blue, sprinkled with wan stars. He had waited in the garden at
Rosewood till Shirley, aided by Emmaline and with Ranston's anxious face
hovering in the background, having performed those gentle offices which
a woman's fainting spell requires, had come to reassure him and to say
good night.

The road seemed no longer dark; it swam before him now in a soft winged
mistiness with here and there an occasional cedar thrusting grotesquely
above huddled cobble-wall and black-lined rail-fence. As he went, her
form swam before him. The texture of each shadowy bush seemed that gauzy
drapery, sprayed with lilies-of-the-valley, and the leaves syllabled her
name in cautious whispers. That brief