had kept him alive through
all the wretched, wretched months of separation,--and she, how had she
endured--?

"I can endure no more," cried Leonore, with almost a scream. "Be
quiet--be quiet--they will hear you,--don't you know that they will hear
you?"

"What if they do?" He was past that. "You are here. We are together.
That is enough." He seized her hand, but she fought and struggled, and
eventually wrenched herself free. "You--you _dare_?" she panted.

"Oh, I dare--now. I dare anything now."

"You dare to forget who you are? And who I am?"

"Yes, even that. It is nothing when we love each other"--and again he
laid hold of her.

"Let me go--let me go."

"But----?"

"If you have not altogether lost your senses, Mr. Andrews, you will
leave me this moment--this moment;" she stamped her foot,--"and never,
never cross my path again."

"But, Leonore--?"

"Leonore? Oh, this is too insulting--" a burst of tears. "What have I
done to be thus degraded?--" and she shook the hand torn from his grasp
as though it had been poisoned.

"What have you done? You do not understand----"

"I understand enough--too much." With an effort she changed her tone to
one of infinite disdain. "You are under some strange hallucination, Mr.
Andrews, which alone can account for this extraordinary, intolerable
behaviour. If my father had been alive--but I am still his daughter, and
you, what are _you_?"

The words in themselves might still have failed to arrest him, but the
look, the gesture, the withering emphasis on the "_you_?"--he stood
still, and after a moment, staggered a step across the pathway like a
drunken man.

"If you confess it was all a delusion," resumed Leonore, in slightly
modified accents, for she was now only eager to put an end to the scene,
and a twinge of pity made itself felt, "if you allow that you have
utterly misinterpreted a little ordinary civility--well, perhaps it was
more than civility, call it kindness if you will--I will try to
forget,--but you also must forget, and never breath a word of this
again."

"But--but----" he faltered. Then staggered afresh, unrestrainedly, it
might almost have been thought ostentatiously. It was not a pretty
spectacle.

"For Heaven's sake, pull yourself together," cried Leonore, with a sense
of repulsion. "Be ashamed of this. Own that you are ashamed of it. Own
that I never gave you cause to think--that you have been dreaming----"

"Hush. I am awake now," said th