wer
imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal,
the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not
wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over
her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this elfish
transfiguration.

"Miss Ellison!" he scarcely more than whispered.

"You ought not to speak to me now," she answered, gravely.

"I know it; but I could not help it. For heaven's sake, do not let it
tell against me. I wished to ask if I should not see you to-morrow; to
beg that all might go on as had been planned, and as if nothing had been
said to-day."

"It'll be very strange," said Kitty. "My cousins know everything now.
How can we meet before them!"

"I'm not going away without an answer, and we can't remain here without
meeting. It will be less strange if we let everything take its course."

"Well."

"Thanks."

He looked strangely humbled, but even more bewildered than humbled.

She listened while he descended the steps, unbolted the street door, and
closed it behind him. Then she passed out of the moonlight into her own
room, whose close-curtained space the lamp filled with its ruddy glow,
and revealed her again, no malicious sprite, but a very puzzled,
conscientious, anxious young girl.

Of one thing, at least, she was clear. It had all come about through
misunderstanding, through his taking her to be something that she was
not; for she was certain that Mr. Arbuton was of too worldly a spirit to
choose, if he had known, a girl of such origin and lot as she was only
too proud to own. The deception must have begun with dress; and she
determined that her first stroke for truth and sincerity should be most
sublimely made in the return of Fanny's things, and a rigid fidelity to
her own dresses. "Besides," she could not help reflecting, "my
travelling-suit will be just the thing for a picnic." And here, if the
cynical reader of another sex is disposed to sneer at the method of her
self-devotion, I am sure that women, at least, will allow it was most
natural and highly proper that in this great moment she should first
think of dress, upon which so great consequences hang in matters of the
heart Who--to be honest for once, O vain and conceited men!--can deny
that the cut, the color, the texture, the stylish set of dresses, has
not had everything to do with the rapture of love's young dream? Are not
certain bits of lace and knots of ribbo