The side-rays of the chaise-lamps played on the widow\'s soft, saucy face, threw beguiling shadows under her eyes, and fleeting dimples round those lips that seemed perpetually to invite kisses.

Cosily nestling in the corner of the carriage, her head in its black silk hood tilted back against the cushions, in the flickering uncertain gleam, there was something almost babyish in her whole appearance; something babyish, too, in her attitude of perfect confidence and enjoyment.

Denis O\'Hara, with one arm extended above her head, his hand resting open on the panel, the other hand still clasping the handle of the door, gazed upon the woman who had placed herself so completely in his power, and felt smitten to the heart of him with a tenderness that was well-nigh pain. Hitherto his glib tongue had never faltered with a woman that his lips were not ready to fill the pause with a suitable caress. But not so to-day.

"What\'s come to me at all?" said he to himself, as, frightened by the very strength of his own passion, he could find no word at once ardent and respectful enough in which to speak it. And, indeed, "What had come to him?" was what Mistress Kitty was thinking about the same time. "And what may his arm be doing over my head?" she wondered.

"How beautiful you are!" babbled the Irishman at last.

Mistress Bellairs sat up with an angry start. It was as if she had been stung.

"Heavens!" cried she, thrusting her little forefingers into her ears. "Mr. O\'Hara, if you say that again, I shall jump out of the chay."

Her eyes flashed; she looked capable of fulfilling her threat upon the spot.

"Me darling heart," said he, and had perforce to lay his hands upon her to keep her still. "Sure what else can I say to you, with my eyes upon your angel face?"

Apparently the lady\'s ears were not so completely stopped but that such words could penetrate.

"\'Tis monstrous," said she in hot indignation, "that I should go to all this trouble to escape from the bleating of that everlasting refrain, and have it buzzed at me," she waxed incoherent under the sense of her injuries, "thus at the very outset!"

"My dear love," said he, humbly, capturing the angry, gesticulating hand, "sure me heart\'s so full that it\'s just choking me."

She felt him tremble beside her as he spoke.

Now the trembling lover was not of those that entered into Mistress Kitty\'s scheme of existence. She had, perhaps, reckoned, when planning her escapade, upon being made to tremble a little herself. She had certainly reckoned upon a journey this evening that should be among the most memorable in the annals of her impressions. O\'Hara bashful! O\'Hara tongue-tied! O\'Hara with cold fingers that hardly dared to touch hers! O\'Hara, the gay rattler, with constrained lips!

This was an O\'Hara whose existence she had not dreamed of, and for whose acquaintance, to say the truth, she had small relish.

"What has come to you?" she cried aloud, with another burst of petulance.

"Faith," said he, "and I hardly know myself, Kitty darling. Oh, Kitty," said he, "\'tis vastly well to laugh at love, and play at love; but when love comes in earnest it takes a man as it were by the throat, and it\'s no joke then."

"So I see," said she, with some dryness.

O\'Hara clenched his hand and drew a laboured breath.

*****

Straining, slipping now and again, breaking into spurts of trot, to fall into enforced walking pace once more, the gallant team had dragged the chaise to the summit of the great rise at a speed quite unprecedented, yet comparatively slow.

Now the way lay down-hill. The coachman waved his whip. Bounding along the fair road the wheels hummed; the night-wind blowing in through the half-opened window, set Mistress Kitty\'s laces flapping on her bosom, and a stray curl of Mr. O\'Hara\'s dancing on his pale forehead.

The exhilaration of the rapid flight, the crack of the whip, the mad rhythm of the hoofs, the witchery of the night hour, the risks of the situation, the very madness of the whole enterprise, all combined to set the widow\'s gay blood delightfully astir, mounting to her light brain like sparkling wine.

What! were all the accessories of the play to be so perfect, and was the chief character to prove such a lamentable failure in his part? What! was she, Kitty Bellairs, to be carried off by the most notorious rake in Bath, only to find him as awkward, as dumb, as embarrassed with the incomparable situation as the veriest greenhorn? "It shall not, and it cannot be," said she to herself. And thereupon she changed her tactics.

"Why," said she aloud, with the cooing note of her most melting mood, "I protest one would think, sir, that you were afraid of me."

"Aye, Kitty," said he, simply; "and so I am."

"Oh, fie!" she laughed. "And how have I alarmed you? Think of me," said she, and leaned her face towards him with a smile of archest wit, "not as a stranger, but as a sisther, as a dear, dear cousin."

His eye flamed back at her. Her merry mood was as incongruous to his sudden, storm-serious growth of passion as the gay lilt of a tambourine might be to a solemn chant.

"I think of you," he said, and there was a deep thrill in his voice, "as my wife that is to be."

And so saying he fell upon his knees in the narrow space, and tenderly kissed a fold of her lace, as one, from the knowledge of his own fire, afraid of a nearer touch.

The word "wife" had never a pleasing sound in the lovely widow\'s ears. From neither the past nor the future did it evoke for her an attractive picture.

Coming fro............