He looked at her nervously.

“If you wouldn’t keep me waiting so long,” she said faintly, while her cheeks and lips grew white.

“Well,—­I was mad this morning!  Betty hasn’t spoken to me since yesterday.  She’s been always about with him, and Miss Raeburn let me see once or twice last night that she thought I was in the way.  I never slept a wink last night, and I kept out of their sight all the morning.  Then, after lunch, I went up to him, and I asked him to come for a walk with me.  He looked at me rather queerly—­I suppose I was pretty savage.  Then he said he’d come.  And off we went, ever so far across the park.  And I let out.  I don’t know what I said; I suppose I made a beast of myself.  But anyway, I asked him to tell me what he meant, and to tell me, if he could, what Betty meant.  I said I knew I was a cool hand, and he might turn me out of the house, and refuse to have anything more to do with me if he liked.  But I was going to rack and ruin, and should never be any good till I knew where I stood—­and Betty would never be serious—­and, in short, was he in love with her himself? for any one could see what Miss Raeburn was thinking of.”

The boy gulped down something like a sob, and tried to give himself time to be coherent again.  Marcella sat like a stone.

“When he heard me say that—­’in love with her yourself,’ he stopped dead.  I saw that I had made him angry.  ’What right have you or any one else,’ he said, very short, ‘to ask me such a question?’ Then I just lost my head, and said anything that came handy.  I told him everybody talked about it—­which, of course, was rubbish—­and at last I said, ’Ask anybody; ask the Winterbournes, ask Miss Boyce—­they all think it as much as I do.’ ‘Miss Boyce!’ he said—­’Miss Boyce thinks I want to marry Betty Macdonald?’ Then I didn’t know what to say—­for, of course, I knew I’d taken your name in vain; and he sat down on the grass beside a little stream there is in the park, and he didn’t speak to me for a long time—­I could see him throwing little stones into the water.  And at last he called me.  ‘Frank!’ he said; and I went up to him.  And then—­”

The lad seemed to tremble all over.  He bent forward and laid his hand on Marcella’s knee, touching her cold ones.

“And then he said, ’I can’t understand yet, Frank, how you or anybody else can have mistaken my friendship for Betty Macdonald.  At any rate, I know there’s been no mistake on her part.  And if you take my advice, you’ll go and speak to her like a man, with all your heart, and see what she says.  You don’t deserve her yet, that I can tell you.  As for me’—­I can’t describe the look of his face; I only know I wanted to go away—­’you and I will be friends for many years, I hope, so perhaps you may just understand this, once for all.  For me there never has been, and there never will be, but one woman in the world—­to love.  And you know,’ he said after a bit, ’or you