thick veil covered her face, falling to her shoulders, so that only a dim line of the features could be seen behind it. She bowed to us both in a quaint, timid, old-fashioned way. I shall never forget this my first meeting with Clarissa on that wild headland of those cliffs in Ireland. There will never die out of my ears the long, lonesome cries of the sea birds, the sound of the waters rolling to the rocks three hundred feet below, or those vivid stillnesses which fall upon you between the sound of the waves and the child-cries of the gulls away at sea. These things and that little black figure of a girl whom I had come some hundreds of miles to meet on the bare credit of a story—these I shall never forget.

It could not have been so pregnant a moment with Bellwattle. For if indeed she guesses—as well I know she must—there is bound to be many a mistake in her speculations. Doubtless, she thinks I have met Clarissa before; that, like some Knights of the Round Table, I am pursuing the lady to whom my heart is captive. Whatever she thinks, there will be romance to it. There is not that in a woman capable to conceive so prosaic a mission as mine. Thank God for it too. A woman will stitch the thread of love into the heel of an old sock while a man is impatiently waiting to put it on. For romance to a man is the winning and riding away—away into the heart of a sunset—but to a woman it is all horizon and beyond.

Whatever, then, she thought at our first meeting, there was no such confusion in her mind as was in mine; wherefore she went straight to the point, inquiring of Clarissa's health because, I suppose, it was the most natural thing to say.

"Are your eyes any better, Miss Fawdry?" she asked.

The Miss Fennells glanced quickly at her, and in those glances I felt the cruel power of their coercion. By those glances they forced her to give the answer that she made.

They were no better, she said, quietly.

"But they're no worse, my dear," added Miss Teresa, cleverly. "I'm sure the doctor that Harry made you see in London has treated you the right way."

She made no reply to that. When forced to play a part, it must be difficult to enter with one's whole heart into the spirit of it. I could hear in her silence the brokenness of spirit, that exhaustion of courage which must come when the wings have been beating, ceaselessly beating against the bars of a cage.

They gave her a moment in which to make answer, and then, 

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