Lawrence rose, and threw away his cigar.

"Where's Carolyn?" she asked, quickly.

"Called into the house. Where's Lord Maxwell?"

"Gone back to Seaview. It seems as if we ought to console each other, doesn't it?"

"Yes. But I won't even try to make Maxwell's place good."

"Thank fortune you can't!"

"Is that the way you speak of absent friends?"

Prudence deliberately sat down in the shade of the tree near where Lawrence had been sitting.

"Let us converse," she said.

The young man resumed his position.

"No," remarked Prudence, presently; "that isn't the way I speak of absent friends. I don't know that Lord Maxwell is a friend—"

"What is he, then, I should like to know?" "Oh, well, perhaps you may call him 'first flirter' just now."

Here Prudence pulled a long blade of grass, and thoughtfully examined it.

"First flirter? Ugh!"

After this Lawrence kept silence, and the girl picked the grass to pieces. He glanced at her; he saw that her face was softening in a way he remembered. He thought he would rise and walk away; then it did not seem quite courteous to leave her so markedly.

"I hope you enjoy it," he said, finally.

"Sitting here with you? Oh, yes," she replied, in a gentle voice, but with a quizzical smile.

"No," he said, rather too forcibly; "flirting with Maxwell."

"I don't enjoy it at all," she remarked, plaintively.

"Then I'd be hanged if I'd do it!" he commented, emphatically. "I suppose he likes it, though."

"Rodney, please don't talk to me so."

Prudence suddenly lifted her eyes, and looked at Lawrence. Her whole face seemed to quiver for an instant with some uncontrollable emotion. Then she turned her head aside, and was silent.

Lawrence sat there rigid, waiting for the next words to be spoken. He did not intend to be the one to speak them; but after a moment he said, slowly forming his sentence:

"I think a friend would advise you not to keep up this apparent intimacy with Lord Maxwell."

Prudence laughed, as one laughs who will not weep.

"One must do something," she said.

She did not glance at him now, but he looked at her, boldly and insistently.

"What do you mean?" He put the inquiry authoritatively.

She turned still farther away. "Do you require everything to be explained?" she asked, in a voice just audible.

He hesitated. Then he answered, "I beg your pardon. I require nothing."

She seemed to be waiting that she might have herself more under control. At last she said, "I deserve that you should speak in that way to me."

Lawrence thrust his hands into the pockets of his loose coat. He could shut them fast there and no one would see them.

"Deserve?" he repeated. "I don't understand."

"Yes, you must understand."

The words were spoken softly and tremulously; but the head was still averted. Prudence now went on hurriedly, as if she could not speak fast enough, and as if she were saying something that had long been in her mind to be spoken.

"It must be right to tell you how I've suffered for my—my mistake—I could almost call it crime—of two years ago. I—I—oh, I have suffered!"

The voice ceased, and the speaker covered her face with her hands.

Lawrence felt his heart growing hot with the sudden access of crowding emotions. He gave the girl one look, which took in the graceful, well-remembered figure, as if it were then and there being stamped afresh on his mind.

"Before you married and were happy with the woman you love," Prudence now went on, quickly, "I wanted you to say you forgave me."

"I forgive you," he said, promptly, and with unnecessary distinctness.

Prudence raised her head. Her face was wet, her eyes large and full of light.

"I didn't mean to make a scene," she said, still more hurriedly. "I know you don't like scenes, and I don't like them myself. But I didn't expect ever to see you alone again, and, happening to meet you, I had to tell you that I couldn't live if you didn't forgive me. You do?" "Yes."

"Give me your hand upon it."

Lawrence drew a hand from his pocket, and extended it, grasping closely the hand Prudence placed in it.

"It's a strong hand and true," she said, smiling; "Carolyn will be happy. And she deserves to be."

Prudence withdrew her hand immediately. The two sat in silence, both gazing straight ahead with a look in their eyes as if they saw nothing.

"You will be so much happier with Caro than you would have been with me." Prudence spoke quite cheerfully. "I don't suppose I would have been anything like a model wife, and Caro will be. She'll be always wanting you to be comfortable; while I—I shouldn't have been so thoughtful, I'm afraid; I should only have just—" She stopped abruptly.

Lawrence, with his face still straight ahead, repeated:

"Only have just—"

"Loved you,"—in a tone so penetrating and so sweet that the man who heard it looked like a stone man, in that he made no visible response. She went on directly, in a matter-of-fact way, "I mean, you know, if things had gone on as we once planned." "If you had not jilted me."

"Yes." She hesitated, and then said, "But you just told me that you forgave me."

"So I do."

"You ought; for if I had not done that, you wouldn't now be engaged to Caro; and you'll be so happy with her."

Lawrence moved uneasily. He glanced about him indefinitely. It did not seem to him as if he could abruptly walk away from this girl.

"Are you very tired of me?" she unexpectedly inquired. "Do you want me to go up to the house and tell Caro you are waiting here?"

Here she laughed, the sound ringing out in the still air. But before he could reply, the girl had risen to her feet.

Lawrence rose quickly also. "Are you going?" he asked.

"I bore you so," she said. She was standing before him, her hands clasped and hanging down in front of her. Her face was turned to him, but her eyelids were drooped.

He gave a short laugh. He tried to speak, but his tongue blundered over the words. At last he said, constrainedly, "You speak that which is not." Then he tried to laugh again. Prudence looked about her rapidly. She took a step nearer to her companion.

"It isn't in the least likely that we shall ever be alone together again," she said, in a half voice; "so why need we quarrel?"

"Why, indeed? I have forgiven you, and we are going to be friends. Isn't that our attitude towards each other?"

Prudence clasped her hands. "Oh, Rodney, you don't forgive me, and you don't like me any more!"

He stood silent, grimly looking at the woman before him.

"I can't go on with my life thinking you bear me ill-will,—I tell you I can't!" she said.

"But I don't bear you ill-will. If Lord Maxwell had not married some one else, do you think you would have experienced this access of repentance?"

The instant Lawrence had spoken thus he would have given much to be able to take back the words. But the sting of bitter memory, the recollection of past suffering, overwhelmed him.

Prudence turned so white that it almost seemed as if she would fall. But she did not fall; she stood up straight and stiff. Even her lips appeared to be stiff, for she tried twice to speak before she said: "Mr. Lawrence, will you give me that ring? Leander says you have it again."

For answer Lawrence put his thumb and finger in his waistcoat pocket, and drew forth a ring in which was set a large, dark red stone. He held out the trinket in silence, and laid it in the palm of the extended hand.

"I believe this is the end," he said, after a moment.

Her whole aspect changed in a flash. She smiled while she closed her fingers over the ring. She was glancing at some object behind Lawrence.

"It's not the end," she responded, in a low voice; "it's what I call the sequel." Then, louder, "I'm glad you've come, Caro, for I don't know what would have happened if we had been left to ourselves, Mr. Lawrence is that belligerent. We have quarrelled about everything we've mentioned."

Carolyn advanced along the path behind Lawrence, who, for the life of him, could not refrain from hesitating perceptibly before he turned. In the violence of the revulsion he could hardly breathe. What would Carolyn think of him if she saw his face, which he knew must tell her something, and which he was sure would tell the wrong thing? And how odd in him to hesitate. There was Prudence strolling negligently away. Just now she reached a curve in the path. She paused and turned back. She waved her hand. She sang gaily:

"What good spirits Prudence has!" Carolyn exclaimed, as she reached her lover's side.

"Yes," he answered; then the eyes of the two met, and the girl drew back somewhat.

"Has anything happened?" she asked, in a whisper.

"Nothing,—nothing," he returned, and then added, violently, "I thank heaven that it's you who will be my wife,—you, you, Caro, and no one else!"

She shrank from him still more, but he caught her hands and insisted upon drawing her nearer. With her head on his shoulder she said, indistinctly:

"I hope, oh, I do hope, Rodney, that you are not making a mistake! You're sure, aren't you?"

"Sure? A thousand times sure," he replied, eagerly. "And why should we put off our marriage? You haven't any reason." "Yes, I have; a very strong one."

"I doubt it; and I shall not consider it."

"I want you to be positive, sure beyond question, that you know your own mind."

"Ah!" came triumphantly from Lawrence, "then we'll be married to-morrow."

From that day the young man was possessed with the resolve that his marriage should not be deferred. And of course he won over Carolyn and her mother.

Really, there seemed no need of delay. The two had always known each other; they had sufficient means.

So the day was set for the first week in September. Lawrence came and went in the very highest spirits. They were to start on a long journey, going in the Cunard steamer that sailed on the afternoon of the day. "We will be gone two years at least," Lawrence said. "We'll go everywhere and see everything. Nobody will ever be as happy as we will be."

And Carolyn was quite sure that no one was ever as happy as she was then. She wrote a long letter to Prudence, who was in Newport with her mother, who had come back from Carlsbad. She told her every detail. There was to be no wedding party, only just the family present; mamma had insisted otherwise, but she and Rodney had overruled her; they would probably never be married again, and they wanted things their own way. Only Prue and her mother must come.

And so Prue and her mother came the day before, and were met by Lawrence, who was very thin, with black hollows under very brilliant eyes, and whose manner was full of spirit and gaiety.

"It is evident enough that Rodney is in love with you, my dear," said Prue's mother as she kissed her niece, "and you'll be happy ever after, of course; and that's the way things ought to be."

The marriage was to take place on the morrow. At eight o'clock on the night before, the family rose from the dinner-table. The two girls disappeared up the stairs. The mothers sat in the drawing-room over a fire of logs on the hearth, talking over, for the twentieth time, every detail of the next day. Had Caro really got everything in her trunks? Was she to have the right wraps on board ship?

Lawrence went out of the house. He lingered on the piazza. He lighted a match and looked at the barometer.

"Set fair," he said, aloud. He took off his hat and passed his hand over his forehead.

"That's good," he went on, still aloud; "I'm glad it's set fair. Caro ought to have everything fair; and I shall have fair weather, too, if I'm with her. There was never a luckier fellow in the world than I am."

He kept his hat off. He looked up at the sparkling heavens as he said, reverently:

"Pray God I may make her as happy as she deserves to be!"

He went on down the path that led towards the water, not minding much which way he was going. There was a brisk southwest wind blowing, though it was not cool; rather there was a softness in the air, which was full of the noise of insects.

All at once the young man turned with a distinct purpose towards the bay. He had thought of the Vireo, which lay moored at the wharf in the inlet.

"I'll go out for an hour in her," he thought. He hastened across the field, and in a few moments was going down the slope of the shore.

It was not a clear night, for clouds swept up from the south and hastened over the sky, so that the stars shone out only intermittently in the deep blue-black of the heavens. This was a wind to drive the Vireo at a fine pace over the bay.

Lawrence was impatient to be off. As he unfastened the rope from the post on the wharf, something came pell-mell down the beach, clattering over the shingle and up to his side.

"Oh, I say!" cried Leander, "is that you? I didn't know but it was some scamp goin' to steal the Vireo."

"Did you think you could help it?" asked Lawrence, as he flung down the rope.

"You bet. Goin' out?"

"Yes. Why aren't you in bed?"

"Bed? Ain't you green? Guess I'll go with you." And Leander prepared to clamber on board.

But Lawrence was not in a mood to hear the boy's chatter. He reached forward and took hold of Lee's jacket collar, lifting him back on to the wharf.

"I'd rather be alone," he explained; "and Aunt Tishy'd be sure to worry about you."

As he spoke he leaped into the boat and began to push it off from the planks.

Contrary to Lawrence's expectation, Leander submitted calmly, not to say hilariously. He was heard to dance about on the wharf, and to laugh.

"Goin' alone, are you? All right; go it. If you want any chaperonin' done, just send a cable message; money back if you're not suited. Ta-ta! Be good!"

Leander sat down on the wharf and drew his knees up to his chin. In this position he pulled out of his pocket two cigarettes which he had that day taken from Lawrence's case. Then he took a match from another pocket and "lighted up," puffing so fast that he soon began to choke.

Meanwhile, Lawrence, with the facility of custom, and notwithstanding the darkness, had put up the sail, and the boat skimmed swiftly out over the water.

There was a tiny cabin, a place only made for shelter in a storm. At the entrance of this cabin now a voice asked:

"Is that you, Lee? How did you get the sail up without my help?"