say to you?”

She clasped her other hand on his arm, and her face suddenly grew grave, and, as he thought, more tender even than before; her voice, too, when she spoke again, had sunk to a whisper.

“Nothing—not a word, dear boy,” she said. “You’ve said it all so many times—haven’t you? And I’ve sent you back, with a heartache—oh—ever so many times. But—from to-day, we’ll change all that; from to-day, we’ll begin afresh. That’s why I took your arm, before them all, to-day—to show them my right to walk beside you. Did you understand that?”

There was no reasonable doubt now that this was the Madge of the letter; unless the late Dandy Chater had made proposals, of a like nature, in other quarters. He answered diplomatically.

“Yes—I think I understood that,” he said. “I—I am very grateful.”

“Do you remember,” she went on, “what you said to me when last we met—when I told you you should have your answer definitely? Do you remember that; or have you forgotten it, like so many other things?”

“I said so many things, that perhaps I may have forgotten which one you refer to.” Philip Chater felt rather proud of himself, after this speech.

“You said—‘I’m going to be a stronger, better fellow than I have ever been before; you shall find me changed from to-night; you shall find I’ll be a new man.’ Do you remember that?”

It was a trying moment; and, for the life of him, Philip Chater found it difficult to keep his voice quite steady, when he answered, after a pause—“Yes—I remember.” For this girl, with her hands locked on his arm, and with her eyes looking so trustfully and confidingly into his, had heard those words, of repentance, and hope, and well-meaning, however lightly said, from the lips of a man she would see no more, and who was now washing about horribly, a disfigured thing, with the life beaten out of it. And the man who stood beside her, in his place—in his very clothes—was a fraud and an impostor.

“Did you mean it, Dandy dear? Was it true?”

He answered from his heart, and spoke the truth, in that instance at least. “Yes—God knows it was true,” he said.

They had left the road, and had turned through a gate into a little wood, which belonged, he supposed, to his own estates. Here, quite suddenly, she stopped, and held out both her hands to 

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