into great caverns in enormous rocks.
Horrible dreams!"

"Indigestion," returned Frere. "You don't take exercise enough. You
shouldn't read so much. Have a good five-mile walk."

"And in these dreams," continued Sylvia, not heeding his interruption,
"there is one strange thing. You are always there, Maurice."

"Come, that's all right," says Maurice.

"Ah, but not kind and good as you are, Captain Bruin, but scowling, and
threatening, and angry, so that I am afraid of you."

"But that is only a dream, darling."

"Yes, but--" playing with the button of his coat.

"But what?"

"But you looked just so to-day in the Court, Maurice, and I think that's
what made me so silly."

"My darling! There; hush--don't cry!"

But she had burst into a passion of sobs and tears, that shook her
slight figure in his arms.

"Oh, Maurice, I am a wicked girl! I don't know my own mind. I think
sometimes I don't love you as I ought--you who have saved me and nursed
me."

"There, never mind about that," muttered Maurice Frere, with a sort of
choking in his throat.

She grew more composed presently, and said, after a while, lifting her
face, "Tell me, Maurice, did you ever, in those days of which you have
spoken to me--when you nursed me as a little child in your arms, and fed
me, and starved for me--did you ever think we should be married?"

"I don't know," says Maurice. "Why?"

"I think you must have thought so, because--it's not vanity, dear--you
would not else have been so kind, and gentle, and devoted."

"Nonsense, Poppet," he said, with his eyes resolutely averted.

"No, but you have been, and I am very pettish, sometimes. Papa has
spoiled me. You are always affectionate, and those worrying ways of
yours, which I get angry at, all come from love for me, don't they?"

"I hope so," said Maurice, with an unwonted moisture in his eyes.

"Well, you see, that is the reason why I am angry with myself for not
loving you as I ought. I want you to like the things I like, and to love
the books and the music and the pictures and the--the World I love;
and I forget that you are a man, you know, and I am only a girl; and I
forget how nobly you behaved, Maurice, and how unselfishly you risked
your life for mine. Why, what is the matter, dear?"

He had put her away from him suddenly, and gone to the window, gazing
across the sloping garden at the bay below, sleeping in the soft evening
light. The schooner which had brought the witnes