ising tone:

"Are you cold? Shall I fetch you a shawl?"

And she answers:

"No, thank you. I think the night warm," being, for the moment, carried
away by the strangeness and determination of his manner.

When they are in the garden, and still he has not spoken, she breaks
the silence.

"What is it, Teddy?" she asks, lightly. "I am all curiosity. I never
before saw you look so angry."

"'Angry'?--no,--I hardly think there is room for anger. I have brought
you here to tell you--I will not keep to my engagement with you--an
hour longer."

Silence follows this declaration,--a dead silence, broken only by the
voices of the night and the faint, sweet, dreamy sound of one of
Gungl's waltzes as it steals through the air to where they stand.

They have ceased to move, and are facing each other in the narrow
pathway. A few beams from the illumined house fall across their feet;
one, more adventurous than the rest, has lit on Molly's face, and
lingers there, regardless of the envious moonbeams.

How changed it is! All the soft sweetness, the gladness of it, that
characterized it a moment since, is gone. All the girlish happiness and
excitement of a first ball have vanished. She is cold, rigid, as one
turned to stone. Indignation lies within her lovely eyes.

"I admit you have taken me by surprise," she says, slowly. "It is
customary--is it not?--for the one who breaks an engagement to assign
some reason for so doing?"

"It is. You shall have my reason. Half an hour ago I stood at that
window,"--pointing to it,--"and saw you in the shrubberies--with--Shadwell!"

"Yes? And then?"

"Then--then!" With a movement full of passion he lays his hands upon
her shoulders and turns her slightly, so that the ray which has
wandered once more rests upon her face. "Let me look at you," he says;
"let me see how bravely you can carry out your deception to its end.
Its _end_, mark you; for you shall never again deceive me. I have
had enough of it. It is over. My love for you has died."

"Beyond all doubt it had an easy death," replies she, calmly. "There
could never have been much life in it. But all this is beside the
question. I have yet to learn my crime. I have yet to learn what awful
iniquity lies in the fact of my being with Philip Shadwell."

"You are wonderfully innocent," with a sneer. "Do you think then that
my sight failed me?"

"Still I do not understand," she says, drawing herself up, with a
little proud gesture. "W