ould override scruples."

"Not _true_ love."

"True! Then you own to some love for me, Anne."

"I do--not--know. I have guarded--I mean--cast away--I mean--never
entertained any such thought ever since I was old enough to know how
wicked it would be."

"Anne! Anne!" (in an undertone very like rapture), "you have
confessed all! It is no sin _now_. Even you cannot say so."

She hung her head and did not answer, but silence was enough for
him.

"It is enough!" he said; "you will wait. I shall know you are
waiting till I return in such sort that nothing can be denied me.
Let me at least have that promise."

"You need not fear," murmured Anne. "How could I need? The secret
would withhold me, were there nothing else."

"And there is something else? Eh, sweetheart? Is that all I am to
be satisfied with?"

"Oh sir!--Mr. Archfield, I mean--O Charles!" she stammered.

Mr. Fellowes turned round to consult his pupil as to whether the
halt should be made at the village whose peaked roofs were seen over
the fruit trees.

But when Anne was lifted down from the steed it was with no grasp of
common courtesy, and her hand was not relinquished till it had been
fervently kissed.

Charles did not again torment her with entreaties to share his
exile. Mayhap he recognised, though unwillingly, that her judgment
had been right, but there was no small devotion in his whole
demeanour, as they dined, rode, and rested on that summer's day amid
fields of giant haycocks, and hostels wreathed with vines, with long
vistas of sleek cows and plump dappled horses in the sheds behind.
The ravages of war had lessened as they rode farther from the
frontier, and the rich smiling landscape lay rejoicing in the summer
sunshine; the sturdy peasants looked as if they had never heard of
marauders, as they herded their handsome cattle and responded
civilly when a draught of milk was asked for the ladies.

There was that strange sense of Eden felicity that sometimes comes
with the knowledge that the time is short for mutual enjoyment in
full peace. Charles and Anne would part, their future was
undefined; but for the present they reposed in the knowledge of each
other's hearts, and in being together. It was as in their
childhood, when by tacit consent he had been Anne's champion from
the time she came as a little Londoner to be alarmed at rough
country ways, and to be easily scared by Sedley. It had been then
that Charles had first aw