"Katharine," he said, "I can't stand it. One day you seem to like me, and the next you mock me. You keep me in a fever. You play with me." She stood up and looked at him calmly.

"I must know," he went on, rashly. "You must tell me

"Must!" She breathed the word so softly that he did not hear it.

'Katharine, will you marry me?" he cried, bending eagerly forward, and trying to read her face.

She looked at him with real surprise.

"Will you marry me?" he asked, impatiently, and stretched a trembling hand towards her.

She was highly offended at his speaking at that time. The man was preposterously fickle. It was an insult to her sex.

"Do you fancy yourself at Amalfi?" she asked, bitterly.

"What?" asked he, sharply.

'Perhaps you mistake me for Miss Archer."

"Miss Archer! You don't believe But no. You want an excuse for not answering."

"I want no excuse. I answer that it is impossible."

Irvine looked at her with surprise and alarm.

Presently he said, in a changed tone, "You are very cruel. You know that you have given me hope. Now you throw me off, and pretend to believe" "Pretend!"

"Who told you this precious story about Amalfi?" As he asked the question his thoughts flew to his cousin Ned. Miss Adare turned towards the house. She wondered if any woman was ever so scolded before by a man whom she had just refused. She was strong as the champion of women; but she felt an awful tendency to tears. She dared not stay.

"Don't let me drive you away," he said, in a low voice; "I know the right thing to do," and he strode away into the shadows. He was full of bitterness. He said to himself that she had lured him to town by making her own mother believe that she liked him; that she had deliberately determined to add him to the list of the victims of her vanity. "Now to join Loyd," he said aloud, and at the same moment nearly ran against a man who was standing alone in the shadow of the shrubbery.

Irvine, you look ill. What is the matter?" asked Ned, anxiously.

"Ask Miss Adare," cried Irvine, and then paused,

and added, more slowly, "And ask her why she taunted me with some false story about Amalfi.” "About Amalfi ?"

"I suppose you never spoke of the place to her," and Irvine laughed a most unpleasant laugh.

“Irvine, what do you mean? Irvine, you don't suspect me of trying to injure you? Why should I harm you?"

"Because you love her."

Harefel gave a low cry, and stepped back. Before he could speak, his cousin had disappeared among the deepening shadows, walking fast, and muttering as he walked.

Ned Harefel went towards Miss Adare, stopped, turned away, and walked resolutely into the house. He felt, rather than saw, that the proud Katharine was crying.

201

CHAPTER XVIII.

A CHURCH.

OXFORD is not always a cheerful place in late September. To Irvine Dale, who was alone in lodgings, the town seemed as dreary as himself. He derived a melancholy pleasure from the consciousness of its sympathetic dismalness. He drew the pall about him, as it were, and was still. The colleges were empty of all but an occasional echo. The crumbling grey stone, which by green gardens and in the summer sun is beautiful, seemed cold and dead beneath a sky of its own colour. Even the river, for all its fulness, had a leaden and a sluggish air. The roads, which pass out of the town flat and featureless between mean buildings, were made doubly stagnant by paddled mud and muddy puddle. Farther afield the land was heavy and damp, and the paths which climb the sloping

hills were tracks of slime. It was a wet season, dull, steamy, and listless. The very rain was slow and sullen, soaking a man before he knew that it was raining, and dying out slowly as if for weari

ness.

He

With such weather about him, Irvine having renounced his kind, betook himself doggedly to his books. He read, because he dared not think. was glad to be alone, but was conscious of no other pleasure or hope in life. He nursed his torpor, fearing that some pain might follow; and yet he hardly cared if it did. So he lived through the hours, clinging numbly to a dull routine. Any treadmill was better than the maddening thought of himself, of the woman whom he loved, of the friend whom he had thrust aside. The one good was oblivion. Some remnant of a prejudice, at which he smiled, kept him from opium; perhaps, too, the disinclination to face the shopman. The slavey who brought him food embarrassed him, and made him hide his face behind the book which he pretended to read. The country and the town were sodden; and so was he. Through dark days and lengthening nights he lived a vegetable life, very like a cabbage, save for the dim consciousness that he was such, and the faint hope that such he might