“Please do not follow me, Sir John,” said she, still moving backward.  “I must not remain longer.”

“Only for one moment,” pleaded John.

“No,” the girl responded, “I—­I may, perhaps, bring the key when I come again.  I am glad, Sir John, that you came to meet me this evening.”  She courtesied, and then hurried away toward Haddon Hall.  Twice she looked backward and waved her hand, and John stood watching her through the bars till her form was lost to view beneath the crest of Bowling Green Hill.

“’I brought this key, thinking that you might wish to unlock the gate and come to this side,’” muttered John, quoting the girl’s words.  “Compared with you, John Manners, there is no other fool in this world.”  Then meditatively:  “I wonder if she feels toward me as I feel toward her?  Surely she does.  What other reason could bring her here to meet me unless she is a brazen, wanton creature who is for every man.”  Then came a jealous thought that hurt him like the piercing of a knife.  It lasted but a moment, however, and he continued muttering to himself:  “If she loves me and will be my wife, I will—­I will ...  In God’s name what will I do?  If I were to marry her, old Vernon would kill her, and I—­I should kill my father.”

Then John mounted his horse and rode homeward the unhappiest happy man in England.  He had made perilous strides toward that pinnacle sans honor, sans caution, sans conscience, sans everything but love.

That evening while we were walking on the battlements, smoking, John told me of his interview with Dorothy and extolled her beauty, grace, and winsomeness which, in truth, as you know, were matchless.  But when he spoke of “her sweet, shy modesty,” I came near to laughing in his face.

“Did she not write a letter asking you to meet her?” I asked.

“Why—­y-e-s,” returned John.

“And,” I continued, “has she not from the first sought you?”

“It almost seems to be so,” answered John, “but notwithstanding the fact that one might say—­might call—­that one might feel that her conduct is—­that it might be—­you know, well—­it might be called by some persons not knowing all the facts in the case, immodest—­I hate to use the word with reference to her—­yet it does not appear to me to have been at all immodest in Mistress Vernon, and, Sir Malcolm, I should be deeply offended were any of my friends to intimate—­”

“Now, John,” I returned, laughing at him, “you could not, if you wished, make me quarrel with you; and if you desire it, I will freely avow my firm belief in the fact that my cousin Dorothy is the flower of modesty.  Does that better suit you?”

I could easily see that my bantering words did not suit him at all; but I laughed at him, and he could not find it in his heart to show his ill-feeling.

“I will not quarrel with you,” he returned; “but in plain words, I do not like the tone in which you speak of her.  It hurts me, and I do not believe you would wilfully give me pain.”