ty.

"So it is good-by," he said, as she gave him her hand,
"for a year!"

Something in his voice made her look up suddenly, with
such an unconscious tenderness in her eyes as he had
never seen in any other woman's. She dropped them before
he could be quite certain he recognized it, though his
heart was beating in a way which told him there had been
no mistake.

"Lady Halifax means it to be a year," she answered--and
surely, since it was to be a year, he might keep her hand
an instant longer.

The full knowledge of what this woman was to him seemed
to descend upon John Kendal then, and he stood silent
under it, pale and grave-eyed, baring his heart to the
rush of the first serious emotion life had brought him,
filled with a single conscious desire--that she should
show him that sweetness in her eyes again. But she looked
wilfully down, and he could only come closer to her, with
a sudden muteness upon his ready lips, and a strange
new-born fear wrestling for possession of him. For in
that moment Janet, hitherto so simple, so approachable,
as it were so available, had become remote, difficult,
incomprehensible. Kendal invested her with the change in
himself, and quivered in uncertainty as to what it might
do with her. He seemed to have nothing to trust to but
that one glance for knowledge of the girl his love had
newly exalted; and still she stood before him looking
down. He took two or three vague steps into the middle
of the room, drawing her with him. In their nearness to
each other the silence between them held them
intoxicatingly, and he had her in his arms before he
found occasion to say, between his lingering kisses upon
her hair, "You can't go, Janet. You must stay--and marry
me."

* * * * * * * *

"I don't know," wrote Lawrence Cardiff in a postscript
to a note to Miss Bell that evening, "that Janet will
thank me for forestalling her with such all-important
news, but I can't resist the pleasure of telling you that
she and Kendal got themselves engaged, without so much
as a 'by your leave' to me, this afternoon. The young
man shamelessly stayed to dinner, and I am informed that
they mean to be married in June. Kendal is full of your
portrait; we are to see it to-morrow. I hope he has
arranged that we shall have the advantage of comparing
it with the original."

CHAPTER XXXIV.

"Miss Cardiff's in the lib'ry, sir," said the housemaid,
opening, the door for Kendal next morning with a s