e to the top of the Monument."

"I'll take you to the top of the Monument with pleasure."

"What do you say, Laura?"

"I say that you are a foolish girl," said Lady Laura, "and that I
will have nothing to do with such a scheme."

"Then there is nothing for it but that you should come here; and as
you live in the house, and as I am sure to be here every morning,
and as you have no possible occupation for your time, and as we have
nothing particular to do with ours,--I daresay I shan't see you again
before I go to my aunt's in Berkeley Square."

"Very likely not," he said.

"And why not, Oswald?" asked his sister.

He passed his hand over his face before he answered her. "Because she
and I run in different grooves now, and are not such meet playfellows
as we used to be once. Do you remember my taking you away right
through Saulsby Wood once on the old pony, and not bringing you back
till tea-time, and Miss Blink going and telling my father?"

"Do I remember it? I think it was the happiest day in my life. His
pockets were crammed full of gingerbread and Everton toffy, and we
had three bottles of lemonade slung on to the pony's saddlebows. I
thought it was a pity that we should ever come back."

"It was a pity," said Lord Chiltern.

"But, nevertheless, substantially necessary," said Lady Laura.

"Failing our power of reproducing the toffy, I suppose it was," said
Violet.

"You were not Miss Effingham then," said Lord Chiltern.

"No,--not as yet. These disagreeable realities of life grow upon
one; do they not? You took off my shoes and dried them for me at a
woodman's cottage. I am obliged to put up with my maid's doing those
things now. And Miss Blink the mild is changed for Lady Baldock the
martinet. And if I rode about with you in a wood all day I should
be sent to Coventry instead of to bed. And so you see everything is
changed as well as my name."

"Everything is not changed," said Lord Chiltern, getting up from
his seat. "I am not changed,--at least not in this, that as I loved
you better than any being in the world,--better even than Laura
there,--so do I love you now infinitely the best of all. Do not look
so surprised at me. You knew it before as well as you do now;--and
Laura knows it. There is no secret to be kept in the matter among us
three."

"But, Lord Chiltern,--" said Miss Effingham, rising also to her feet,
and then pausing, not knowing how to answer him. There had been a
suddenness in h