"I have something to tell you," she said gently. "As my prisoner you have behaved in such an exemplary manner, keeping all the rules of the institution, and making no attempt to run away, that I have decided to give you the freedom of another room."

 

"Oh, am I to go into another room?" Had a voyage to Europe been proposed to her it could scarcely have suggested pleasanter ideas of change. "A new wall-paper, and a new window! What more could I ask for? But how am I to get there? What means of transportation have you?"

 

"That is just what I am thinking of. I could dress you in my gray wrapper, and then--would you mind if Allan were to help me to lift you to the couch in my room?"

 

Rose shuddered a little. A faint pink stained for a moment the whiteness of her cheek. "I shouldn't mind it if I were senseless," she said, "but I don't want him to think I have lost my senses again. No, we'll have to give up that idea."

 

But Mrs. Dunlop was not the sort of person to give up an idea without good cause. "The mountain must then go to Mahomet," said she, and wheeling the couch close to the sick-bed, she arranged the invalid cosily among the cushions, and pushed her slowly into her own apartment. "If I were twice as large as you are," she added, "instead of being just your size, I should have carried you in half the time."

 

But another and more serious consequence followed that same evening upon the striking similarity in figure between Mrs. Dunlop and Miss Macleod. Golden twilight had changed to dim dusk, but Rose still lay with her fair head almost buried among the cushions. She expected a visit from her father that evening, and the temptation to show him what she could do and dare was irresistible. All her hostess's hints that bed-time had arrived were wasted upon deaf ears. At last, in a little anxiety as to the result of her experiment, if the Commodore did not arrive, Mrs. Dunlop went out to the front gate to see if there were signs of his approach. At the same moment Allan entered the house by the back door, and looked about for his mother. Impelled by a "fatalistic necessity" he went up to her room, the sound of his carefully modulated tread upon the stairway filling the heart of Rose with delight, for was not that her own father, who had probably been informed at the gate of the change in her condition and surroundings, and who was coming up so softly in order to surprise her. Allan, meanwhile, glancing in, saw nothing in the gray gloom but a small figure in a well-known wrapper, stretched wearily upon the couch. "Poor little mother," he thought. "She is quite tired out." He went up to her intending to bestow a filial caress upon her cheek, but before his design could be accomplished he was drawn close by a single arm around his neck, and repeatedly kissed. "You blessed darling!" she softly exclaimed, "here I've been waiting for you, and waiting for you and longing--Oh!" That silky moustache and that chin, that was not stubby, could they belong to a gentleman of sixty years? Her right arm fell limp and useless as the other. "I thought you were my father," she said in a weak voice of mingled disappointment, anger and shame.

 

"And I thought you were my mother," was all the guilty wretch could offer in extenuation of his conduct.

 

The people whose parts this unfortunate pair had been playing with such ill success were now heard at the door below. Allan felt like a criminal as he stole into the hall, and thence into his own room; but the Commodore could scarcely understand the propriety of a strange and otherwise objectionable young man holding a moonless tete-a-tete with his daughter. In any case his presence would involve disagreeable explanations. If her cheeks were as flushed as his own no doubt her doting parent would ascribe it to renewed health and strength.

 

But the young man, sitting alone in the perfumed darkness of that summer night, with his hot head fallen upon the window-sill, did not imagine that the fire that burned along his own veins was an indication of health. On the contrary, he feared it the symptom of a dreaded disease--the fever and delirium of love. What was that little yellow-haired girl to him? Nothing! nothing! Yet her kisses burned upon his lips, and every drop of blood in his body seemed to contradict his nonchalant nothing with a passionate everything! Yes, she was in truth the lamp of his life, but in that radiant light how pitiful his life appeared. How pitiful, and yet how beautiful, for in the tender illumination of her imagined love rough places became smooth, dark ways bright, and the heights of possible achievement were faintly flushed with all the delicate tints of dawn--the dawn of a diviner day than any he had yet looked upon. When he went to sleep it was to dream of walking in a wilderness of roses. Pale and drooping, broken and dying, red and roguish, blushing, wanton, wild and warm, each bore some fantastic resemblance to Rose Macleod, and each was set about with "little wilful thorns." The hand which he eagerly outstretched to pluck the loveliest rose of all was pierced and bleeding. Still he did not despair of reaching it. But as his longing eyes drew nearer and nearer the stately little beauty turned suddenly a deep blood-red, and then he saw that the crimson drops falling from his own wounds had worked this transformation. He hid her in his bosom, and held her there. But the closer she was pressed the richer and more fragrant was the breath she exhaled, intoxicating all his senses, and the farther into his heart went the cruel thorns, until in mingled pain and rapture he awoke.

 

This Allan Dunlop, though born and bred on a farm, had in him the spring of a higher and finer life. He was a man of delicate instincts, refined feelings, and great native sensibility, inherited from his mother, at whose history we may take a rapid backward glance.

 

Far away in one of the stately homes of "Merrie England," when the eighteenth century was old, a gentlewoman, young, charming, and full of an habitually repressed life and gaiety, waited for her cavalier, the youthful riding-master who had little to recommend himself to her gracious kindness save that deep but indefinable charm which a handsome man on a spirited charger is so prone to exert on the feminine imagination. The morning was fair, the lady was fairer, and the heart of her gallant attendant beat faster than the feet of his steed, as the flying skirt of her robe swept his stirrup, and the soft length of her mist-like veil blew before his eyes and caressed his brown cheek. It was not the only mist that blew before his eyes nor before her's either, poor child! for the rival contrast between this wild rush over hedge and ditch and bright green meadow and the stiffly guarded walks and ways of home had spurred her imagination also into a gallop. "We will never come back," he said jestingly, "we will ride away into a world of our own!" but there was something reckless in his laugh and a formidable note of earnestness in his jesting. He never dreamed that her pulse beat quicker after his careless speeches, and he was in truth a good deal in awe of her, for the buckram propriety which had encased her like a garment ever since she could remember was not easily thrown aside. This young pair, though as deeply in love with each other as it is possible for man and maid to be, had never acknowledged the fact by a syllable. Anna Sherwood was too shy and prim; Richard Dunlop too poor and proud. He had been a trooper in a cavalry regiment, afterwards riding-master in a garrison town in England, and since his coming to Canada, and before taking to farming, he held the position of fort-adjutant at Penetanguishene; at present he was tutor in equestrian arts to the young lady whom he passionately loved. Of her there is little to tell except that until this dashing young fellow crossed her path she had experienced about as much change and variety in her life as though she had been a plant grown in a flower-pot. On sunny days she was allowed the outside air; on stormy days she was kept within. She toiled not, neither did she spin. Nothing was required of her except colourless acquiescence in a life of torpid, unnatural, unendurable ennui.

 

The young lady's only guardian was a wealthy maiden aunt, who was as rich as she was old maidish--a statement likely to thrill the heart of any mammon-worshipper among her acquaintance--and whose special pride was the exemplary manner in which she had brought up her brother's child. The daring young fellow who had presumed to fall in love with this model niece followed her uninvited into the family sitting-room on returning from their ride, a proceeding which rather alarmed the gentle Anna, though her much dreaded relative was absent. He did not sit down, but took a decisive stand on the hearth-rug. He looked like a man who has something he must say, though the saying of it will all but cost him his life. She sat down with a strange foreboding at her heart of something terrible to come. The austere influences of her aunt's home were upon her. She sat in prim composure, pale hands clasped, and pale lids drooping upon ............