o you not agree with me, that the safest plan that man can adopt is to
run away?"

Her quickened heart might almost have been running a life-and-death race
with her leaping pulse, but she answered him almost steadily.

"Yes," she said to him. "You are quite right. He had better go away."

"Thank you," he returned again. "Then you will give me your hand and
wish me God-speed; and, perhaps--I say perhaps--you will answer me
another question. This morning, when you spoke to me through the
carriage window, you began to say something about being glad. Were you
going to say--" He broke off here, sharply. "No!" he exclaimed. "I will
not ask you."

"I was going to say that I was glad to see you," Theo interrupted,
gravely. "I was glad to see you. And now, perhaps, you had better tell
the coachman to drive on. I will deliver your message to Lady
Throckmorton; and as I shall not see you again, unless I am here in
July--of course you will come back then--good-bye, Mr. Oglethorpe."

She gave him her hand through the carriage-window, and, for a moment, he
held it, to all appearance quite calm, as he looked down at the lovely
face the flare of an adjacent gaslight revealed to him against a
background of shadow.

"Good-bye," he said, and then released it. "Drive on," he called to the
coachman, and in a moment more, he stood alone watching the carriage
turn the corner.

CHAPTER V.

THE SEPARATION.

"Mr. Denis Oglethorpe has gone away. He will not come back again until
July, when he is to marry Miss Gower."

This was the last entry recorded in the little pink-and-gold journal,
and after it came a gap of months.

It was midnight after the memorable day spent in Broome street that the
record was made, and having made it, Theodora North shut the book with a
startled feeling that she had shut within its pages an unfinished page
of her life.

It was a strange feeling to have come upon her so suddenly, and there
was a strange kind of desperateness in its startling strength. It was
startling; it had come upon her without a moment's warning, it seemed,
and yet, if she had been conscious of it, there had been warning enough.
Warning enough for an older woman--warning enough for Denis Oglethorpe;
but it had not seemed warning to a girl of scarcely seventeen years. But
she understood it now; she had understood it the moment he told her in
that strained, steady voice that he was going away. She had delivered
his message to L