The place had moreover a confessed out-of-season vacancy.

She appeared to have determined on silence for the present mark of her relation with Harold, yet she soon failed to resist a sufficiently poor reason for breaking it.

"Be so good as to get out of my chair." "What will you do for me," he asked, "if I oblige you ?" He never moved--but as if only the more directly and intimately to meet her--and she stood again before the fire and sounded his strange little face.

"I don't know what it is, but you give me sometimes a kind of terror." "A terror, mamma ?" She found another place, sinking sadly down and opening her book, and the next moment he got up and came over to kiss her, on which she drew her cheek wearily aside.

"You bore me quite to death," she coldly said, "and I give you up to your fate." "What do you call my fate ?" "Oh something dreadful--if only by its being publicly ridiculous." She turned vaguely the pages of her book.