reath as she turned her head. Her cheeks took
fire, and for a second were aflame. Then they went deadly white, and
it seemed that time and life and the very world had paused in its
relentless progress towards eternity. For there stood the object of her
thoughts and sighs, sudden and unexpected, as though the earth had cast
him up on to her surface.

His thin lips were parted in a smile that softened wondrously the
harshness of his face, and his eyes seemed then to her alight with
kindness. A moment's pause there was, during which she sought her voice,
and when she had found it, all that she could falter was:

"Sir, how came you here? They told me that you rode to London."

"Why, so I did. But on the road I chanced to halt, and having halted I
discovered reason why I should return."

He had discovered a reason. She asked herself breathlessly what might
that reason be, and finding herself no answer to the question, she put
it next to him.

He drew near to her before replying. "May I sit with you awhile,
Cynthia?"

She moved aside to make room for him, as though the broad cliff had been
a narrow ledge, and with the sigh of a weary man finding a resting-place
at last, he sank down beside her.

There was a tenderness in his voice that set her pulses stirring wildly.
Did she guess aright the reason that had caused him to break his journey
and return? That he had done so--no matter what the reason--she thanked
God from her inmost heart, as for a miracle that had saved him from the
doom awaiting him in London town.

"Am I presumptuous, child, to think that haply the meditation in which
I found you rapt was for one, unworthy though he be, who went hence but
some few days since?"

The ambiguous question drove every thought from her mind, filling it to
overflowing with the supreme good of his presence, and the frantic hope
that she had read aright the reason of it.

"Have I conjectured rightly?" he asked, since she kept silence.

"Mayhap you have," she whispered in return, and then, marvelling at her
boldness, blushed. He glanced sharply at her from narrowing eyes. It was
not the answer he had looked to hear.

As a father might have done he took the slender hand that rested upon
the grass beside him, and she, poor child, mistaking the promptings of
that action, suffered it to lie in his strong grasp. With averted head
she gazed upon the sea below, until a mist of tears rose up to blot it
out. The breeze seemed full