Everard Lisle seemed to tread on air as he walked beside Lady Pell to the custodian\'s cottage, where they found Mrs. Tew and Ethel awaiting them. Luncheon was ready and they at once sat down to it. They made a very merry little party, Everard in especial being in the gayest of spirits.

"Now, what I should recommend you young people to do," said her ladyship by-and-by, "is to go in search of the Haunted Pool, about which the guide was telling us this morning. He said it was not above a mile away, and, in any case, the woods themselves are most lovely just now. As for Mrs. Tew and I, we shall have a couple of comfortable chairs taken out into the shade of yonder oak, and there have a quiet gossip to ourselves. And don\'t forget that tea will be ready at five o\'clock to the minute."

We may be sure that Lisle and Ethel were by no means loth to carry out her ladyship\'s behest, and presently they were lost to view among the green shadows of the wood. Lady Pell gazed after them with a well-satisfied smile, but it was with a sigh that the canon\'s widow followed their retreating figures. "Oh, to be young again and in love!" she said, hardly witting that she spoke aloud.

"And have all the troubled record of our lives to go through again," said her ladyship. "For my part no such desire ever enters my mind. All things considered, I\'m pretty well content to be as I am."

Perhaps for the moment she failed to remember that her life had many compensations denied to poor Mrs. Tew.

It was one of those lovely October days which make a golden bridge between summer and winter. The woods were clothed with their richest garments--a kaleidoscope of gorgeous tints, albeit the vesture of decay; The dry leaves rustled under their feet, and little splashes of colour kept dropping round them as they went. Here and there a rabbit peered cautiously at them for a moment, showed a flash of white and was gone. Somewhere out of sight a robin was fluting a monody to the dying year. They walked on for some time in silence; Everard seemed to have left all his gaiety behind him. There was something about his changing moods to-day which Ethel failed to understand. She had known all along that his love had never altered or varied in the slightest, and of late her own heart had whispered its secret to her in accents she could no longer mistake. More than once during the last few weeks she had felt nearly sure Everard was on the point of saying that which, almost unknown to herself, she was secretly longing to hear; but the propitious moment had gone by and he had not spoken, and not improbably it was the vague sense of disappointment that had crept over her at such times which had first served to open her eyes to the truth as regarded herself.

But somehow to-day she had no prevision of what was so imminent. Not even now that she had come with him for a solitary woodland ramble. For that day at least he seemed to have absolved himself from all serious thoughts, from all matters of moment, and to be transformed for the time into the similitude of a laughing, light-hearted school-boy. She could not know--how should she--that it was her presence, that it was the privilege of being able to spend several consecutive hours in her sweet company, which had thus had power to metamorphose him almost beyond his knowledge of himself.

From the summit of the keep he had caught a silvery gleam of water in a hollow no great distance away. It was probably the Haunted Pool, about which the guide had told them, and lay darkling in its forest hollow, with a fringe of bulrushes, and outside that a margin of soft turf that was pleasant to the feet. For all it had the name of being haunted, there was nothing weird or uncanny about the place, but rather an air of sweet solitariness as though of one of Nature\'s temples, sacred to the shy creatures of the wood, upon which for any human foot to intrude was to break some mystic spell.

For a few moments Lisle and Ethel stood drinking in the silent beauty of the scene. Then said Everard,

"Suppose we rest here awhile, \'the world forgetting, by the world forgot.\'" Speaking thus he led the way to the trunk of a tree, blown down in some tempest years before, which had been left unheeded where it had fallen.

And now at length had come the moment so long looked forward to, so long delayed, so long regarded with apprehension, but now at last seized on with a gladness which he himself felt to be closely allied to audacity. For events might yet make a mockery of his gladness and prove it to have no better foundation than a certain oracular utterance on the part of an old lady who believed herself possessed of a gift for seeing farther into a millstone than her neighbours. All this might come to pass of course, and yet he was not at all dismayed. To-day he felt lifted above the common world. For the time he breathed "an ampler ether, a diviner air."

Nevertheless, it was in very commonplace terms that he began what he had to say.

"Do you know, Lady Pell quite startled me as she and I were standing together on the keep before luncheon." He was not looking at Ethel, but leaning forward and punching holes in the turf with the ferrule of his walking-stick.

"I should have thought your nerves proof against anything Lady Pell might have to say to you," answered Ethel smilingly.

"She gave me to understand that her stay at the Chase was drawing to a close, and that in a very little while she and you would be winging your flight elsewhere."

There was a moment\'s silence, and then Ethel said: "It was a very natural announcement, and I cannot see what there was in it to startle you."

"That is because you look at it from one point of view, and I from another. To you it means fresh faces and other scenes--in short, a change, probably more or less welcome after the quiet and monotony of existence at Withington Chase."

He paused. Ethel was quite aware that he was waiting for her to say: "And from your point of view what does it mean?" By this she needed no one to tell her what his reply would be. Everything had been revealed to her as in a flash, and she marvelled at her blindness. And now the point for her to decide, and that on the instant, was whether she should, or should not, ask him that simple-seeming question, which she felt would but be the precursor to one of infinitely more significance on his part, from answering which there would be no possible escape for her. And in what terms was she prepared to answer it? Her heart-throbs seemed to deafen her and her mind was torn by a conflict of emotions, among which, however, one claimed predominance over the others. She knew and owned to herself that she loved him. Then in the silence a voice spoke. "And from your point of view, Mr. Lisle, what does Lady Pell\'s announcement mean?" It was as though some force within her had compelled her to put the question in her own despite.

"It means," began Everard, and he paused for an instant as if his breath had suddenly failed him--"it means more, far more than I could tell you in many words." Neither of them had been looking at each other, but Lisle now left off his employment of punching holes in the turf, and drawing himself up, he turned on Ethel a face all aglow with the emotion of the moment.

"When you quit the Chase," he went on, "I shall lose that which to me is the most precious object on earth, and who shall say whether I shall ever find it again? Ethel, on that April day which now seems so long ago that I could fancy it............