smiles, and all the forest deeps are by "a tender
whisper pierced."

Conscience forbidding her, she abstains from entering those coveted
woods, and, with a sigh, seats herself upon the top of the green bank.

"Monica!" says a voice close to her, yet not close to
her,--mysteriously, far up in mid-air, right over her head. She starts!
Is the great wood peopled with satyrs, ouphs, or dryads?

CHAPTER XVII.

The marvellous history of how Monica finds the green-eyed monster in
a beech-tree--and how, single-handed, she attacks and overcomes him.

It is not a tender voice. It is not even a gentle or coldly friendly
voice. It is, when all is told, a distinctly angry voice, full of
possible reproaches and vehement upbraidings.

Monica, raising her head with extreme nervousness, had just time to see
Mr. Desmond in the huge fir-tree above her, before he drops at her feet.

"What on earth were you doing up there?" asks she, thinking it wise to
adopt the offensive style, so as to be first in the field, feeling
instinctively that a scolding is coming and that she deserves it.

"Watching _you_," returns he, sternly, nothing dismayed by her
assumption of injured innocence, so her little ruse falls through.

"A charming occupation, certainly!" says Miss Beresford, with fine
disgust.

"I climbed up into that tree," says Mr. Desmond, savagely, "and from it
saw that you had spent your entire day with that idiot, Ryde."

"Do you think," says Miss Beresford, with awful calm, "that it was a
_gentlemanly_ thing to climb into that tree, like a horrid schoolboy,
and spy upon a person?--_do you?_"

"I don't," vehemently, "but I was driven to it. I don't care what is
gentlemanly. I don't care," furiously, "what you think of me. I only
know that my mind is now _satisfied_ about you, and that I know you are
the most abominable flirt in the world, and that you ought to be ashamed
of yourself."

"Well, I'm not," with great self-possession.

"The more to your discredit! That only means that you are bent on doing
it again."

"I shall certainly always talk to any man who talks to me. That is,"
cuttingly, "any man who knows how to conduct himself with propriety."

"Meaning--_I_ don't, I suppose?"

"_Certainly_ you don't."

"Oh, if it comes to that," says Desmond, in tones of the deepest
desperation, and as if nothing is left to expect but the deluge in
another moment.

And, in effect, it comes. Not, as one has been taug