med to become. Both, for example, had rather thin
lips; but his were rigid, precise, and seeming to part with a certain
deliberation and even difficulty. Hers appeared, even when she was
silent, to be tremulous with expression. After a while it would have
seemed to an observer, if any observing eye were there, that no power on
earth could have brought these two into companionship.

"I won't take this as your final answer," he said, after one or two
unsuccessful efforts to speak. "You will consider this again, and give
it some serious reflection."

She only shook her head, and once more seated herself on the steps of
the monument as if to suggest that now the interview was over.

"You are not walking homeward?" he asked.

"I am staying here for awhile."

He bade her good morning and walked slowly away. A rejected lover looks
to great disadvantage when he has to walk away. He ought to leap on the
back of a horse, and spur him fiercely and gallop off; or the curtain
ought to fall and so finish up with him. Otherwise, even the most heroic
figure has something of the look of one sneaking off like a dog told
imperatively to "go home." Mr. Sheppard felt very uncomfortable at the
thought that he probably did not seem dignified in the eyes of Miss
Grey. He once glanced back uneasily, but perhaps it was not a relief to
find that she was not looking in his direction.

CHAPTER II.

THE EVE OF LIBERTY.

Miss Grey remained in the park until the sun had gone down and the
stars, with their faint light, seemed as she moved homeward to be like
bright sparkles entangled among the high branches of the trees. She had
a great deal to think of, and she troubled herself little about the
mental depression of her rejected lover. All the purpose of her life was
now summed up in a resolve to get away from Keeton and to bury herself
in London.

She knew that any opposition to her proposal on the part of those who
were still supposed to be her guardians would only be founded on an
objection to it as something unwomanly, venturous, and revolutionary,
and not by any means the result of any grief for her going away. Ever
since her mother's death and her father's second marriage she had only
chafed at existence, and found those around her disagreeable, and no
doubt made herself disagreeable to them. She had ceased to feel any
respect for her father when he married again, and he knew it and became
cold and constrained with her. Only just bef