her--"Leo?"

Leo meekly raised her eyes, overmastered, dumb. It was the hardest
moment of Paul's life. One look, one word between them, and she would
have been dragged down into the whirlpool from which it was his part to
save her. A great convulsion shook his frame, and he set his teeth and
swore, then drew her gently to his side.

"My little sister must forget all this. It is a bad dream and it is over
and past. She must promise me----"

"What--Paul?"

"She must promise me--solemnly--before God, in Whose Presence we
are"--he looked up, the sky was clear and shining overhead--"that she
will never--mark me, Leo, _never_--as long as life lasts, allow herself
to think of cutting it short again. Before God, Leo!"

He lifted her hand, still fast in his, as though invoking the Unseen
Presence, and almost inaudibly she repeated after him the words of the
promise.

"We must hasten home now," said Paul, with a rapid transition to another
tone. "The short cut from Claymount is somewhere hereabouts," looking
round--"and we shall get back," he took out his watch, "before the house
is shut up, if we walk briskly. You can walk, can't you? I mean, of
course you will have to walk, but can you step out? If you would care to
have an arm----"

"I can walk quite well, thank you--but, oh, Paul, just this--mayn't I
say it----?"

"Better not, dear." The word slipped out; he was unconscious of it, but
she heard. They hurried home.

CHAPTER XVII.

A KNIGHT TO THE RESCUE.

"No, you don't--and don't you think it."

Somebody, and that a formidable personage, had been a witness of the
scene just narrated.

We would not for a moment call poor Val Purcell an eavesdropper _au
naturel_, but he certainly had a talent for picking up by the wayside
things which did not exactly belong to him.

Val, as we know, was not quite like other people.

It was only now and then that he showed this; in the ordinary give and
take of society he passed muster well enough, and no one would more
readily have spurned the notion of doing what others did not do--that
being the poor boy's code of conduct,--yet he is not to be hardly judged
if occasionally it failed him at a pinch. Wherefore if when passing
through the Abbey woods on the afternoon in question, he heard voices
and crept near to peep and listen, let it be believed that the feeling
which arrested his footsteps was in its way innocent. His curiosity was
roused, and he had a hearty sym