e
lines on the dog's wrinkled forehead with her finger. "Several men have
asked her to marry. But there is only one man in the world, I fancy,
whom Mary would ever care to marry--poor Camp, did I tickle you?--and
he, I believe, has not asked her yet."

"Ah! there," Ormiston exclaimed quickly, "you are mistaken."

"Am I?" Katherine said. "I have great faith in Mary. I suppose she was
too wise to accept even him, being not wholly convinced of his love."

Lady Calmady raised her eyes. Ormiston looked very keenly at her. And
Richard, watching them, felt his breath come rather short with
excitement, for he understood that his mother was speaking in riddles.
He observed, moreover, that Colonel Ormiston's face had grown pale for
all its sunburn.

"And so," Katherine went on, "I think the man in question had better be
quite sure of his own heart before he offers it to Mary Cathcart
again."

Ormiston flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. He came and stood
in front of Richard.

"Look here, old chap," he said, "what do you say to our driving over to
Newlands to-morrow? You can set me right if I've forgotten any of the
turns in the road, you know. And you and Miss Cathcart are great chums,
aren't you?"

"Mother, may I go?" the boy asked.

Lady Calmady kissed his forehead.

"Yes, my dearest," she said. "I will trust you and Uncle Roger to take
care of each other for once. You may go."

The immediate consequence of all which was, that Richard went to bed
that night with a brain rather dangerously active and eyes rather
dangerously bright. So that when sleep at last visited him, it came
burdened with dreams, in which the many impressions and emotions of the
day took altogether too lively a part, causing him to turn restlessly
to and fro, and throw his arms out wide over the cool linen sheets and
pillow.

For there was new element in Dickie's dreams to-night:--namely, a
recurrent distress of helplessness and incapacity of movement, and
therefore of escape, in the presence of some on-coming multitudinous
terror. He was haunted, moreover, by a certain stanza of the ballad of
Chevy Chase. It had given him a peculiar feeling, sickening yet
fascinating, ever since he could remember first to have read it, a
feeling which caused him to dread reading it beforehand, yet made him
turn back to it again and again. And to-night, sometimes Richard was
himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in that of
Witherington, the