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His keen, thin, large-boned face, alive with a kind of gay, plucky humour, large heavy-lidded gray eyes, and long, loose-limbed figure, were each and all so utterly unlike Miss Cheale that no one could have believed them to be what they were, brother and sister.

Guy Cheale had often reverted to the enchanted moment that had brought them first face to face; and he had told her again and again what she was never tired of hearing—how beautiful, how proud and how disdainful he had thought her.

But she knew nothing of the cruel hunting instinct which had prompted what had immediately followed her entry into the room.

“What is your name?” he had asked, and when she answered, “Lucy, sir. I’m Mrs. Warren’s daughter,” he had got up and, gazing straight into her face, had uttered the strange, poignant words—“A dying man—for that’s what I’m supposed to be, my pretty dear—ought to be given a certain license, eh?”

“License, sir?” she had repeated, falteringly.

“License in the way of love-making! I suppose you know, Lucy, that I’m said to be dying? And so I am—dying for a little love!”

That had been the beginning of it all. And though she had been, for quite a long while, what she termed to herself “standoffish,” they had become, in time, dear friends—meeting often in secret, as some dear friends are forced to do. It had not been easy for them to meet, even in secret; for there is no place in the world so full of a kind of shrewd, cruel scandal-mongering as is an English village, and it said much for the intelligence, not only of Guy Cheale, but also 14of Lucy Warren, that their names had never yet been connected the one with the other.

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All the same, as is always the way with a man and a woman who are determined on meeting, they had seen each other almost daily. And now and again they had had a grand, a wonderful innings! Once Mrs. Warren had had to go away for a week and Lucy had been given some hours off each day in order that she might prepare the lunch and supper of her mother’s lodger.

During those days—days on which he had insisted on helping her to do everything, even to the cooking of his meals in the big, comfortable farm kitchen, their friendship had grown apace. No man knew better the way to a woman’s heart, and, posing then as her friend, and only as her friend, he had encouraged her to talk about 

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