ht again, made the past recede, and appear a dream,
and supplied a sweet reason for all the wifely duty, all the long
fealty and impassioned love she was to bestow on him ever after.

It was strange, even to her, who was so well accustomed to the
unreasoning, exaggerated rhapsody of a lover, to hear him; his rage
against himself, his entire hopelessness; and as for her, she knew not
how to stop him, or how to help him; she could but listen and wonder.

Nature helped him, however; for a waft of summer wind coming in at that
moment, swung the rose-branches that clustered round the window, and
flung some of their white petals on her head. Something else stirred,
she felt a slight movement behind her, and a little startled, turned
involuntarily to look, and to see her cap--the widow's delicate
cap--wafted along the carpet by the air, and settling at John Mortimer's
feet.

He lifted it up, and she stood mute while she saw him fold it together
with a man's awkwardness, but with something of reverence too; then, as
if he did not know what else to do with it, he laid it on the table
before an opened miniature of Fred Walker.

After a moment's consideration she saw him close this miniature, folding
its little doors together.

"That, because I want to ask a favour of you," he said.

"What is it?" she asked, and blushed beautifully.

"You gave me a kiss, let me also bestow one--one parting kiss--and I
will go."

He was about to go then, he meant to consider himself dismissed. She
could not speak, and he came up to her, she gave him her hand, and he
stooped and kissed her.

Something in her eyes, or perhaps the blush on her face, encouraged him
to take her for a moment into his arms. He was extremely pale, but when
she lifted her face from his breast a strange gleam of hope and wonder
flashed out of his eyes.

She had never looked so lovely in her life, her face suffused with a
soft carnation, her lucid grey-blue eyes full of sweet entreaty.
Nevertheless, she spoke in a tone of the quietest indifference--a sort
of pensive wistfulness habitual with her.

"You can go if you please," she said, "but you had much better not."

"No!" he exclaimed.

"No," she repeated. "Because, John--because I love you."

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE TRUE GHOST STORY.

_Horatio._--"Look, my lord, it comes!"
Hamlet the Dane.

Valentine was at Melcombe again. He had begun several improvements about
the place which called for