an was to take boat at Marseilles for the East, making
their first permanent resting-place one of the islands of the Grecian
Archipelago. Both were most anxious to evade any possibility of
interception, more especially of collision with Dick Tresilyan.

On that evening Cecil was alone in her own room (Mrs. Danvers had gone
out to a sort of love-feast at the Fullartons', where the company were
to be entertained with weak tea and strong doctrine _a discretion_). She
had rejected the offer of Fanny's companionship on the plea, not
altogether false, of a tormenting headache. _La mignonne_ was too
innocent to suspect the reason that made her friend shudder in their
parting embrace, half averting her cheek, though Cecil's arms clung
round her as though they would never let her go. The saddest feeling of
the many that were busy then in the guilty, troubled heart, was a
consciousness that in a few hours the gulf between them would be deep
and impassable as the chasm dividing Abraham from Dives.

Miss Tresilyan had taken unconsciously an attitude in which you saw her
once before, half-reclined, and gazing into the fire; outwardly still
remained the same pensive, languid grace; but very different was the
careless reverie that had stolen over her then, from the wild chaos of
conflicting thoughts that involved her now.

Her whole being was so bound up in Royston Keene's, that she felt
without him there would be nothing worth living for; neither had she the
faintest misgiving as to the chances of his inconstancy. There had
descended to her some of the stability and determination of purpose
which had made many of her race so powerful for good or evil; in the
pursuit of either they would never admit a doubt, or listen to a
compromise. When Cecil believed, she believed implicitly, and, not even
with her own conscience, made conditions of surrender. So long as _his_
strong arm was round her, she felt that she could defy shame, and even
remorse; but how would it be if that support should fail? He had not
been away yet twenty hours, and already there came creeping over her a
chilling sense of helplessness and desolation. She knew her lover's
violent passions and haughty temper, impatient of the most distant
approach to insolence or even contradiction from others, too well not to
be aware that such a man walked ever on the frontier-ground between life
and death. Suppose that he were taken from her?--her spirit, dauntless
as it was, quail