"I have promised old Mrs. Daly; I must go," replies Kit, with the determination of a Brutus. "If I am not back in time for dinner, you will understand what has happened."
This is awful! Monica turns quite pale.
"Of course I shall go with you," she says, hurriedly. "Is your head so very bad, darling? How bravely you carried it off in there!" pointing towards the morning-room they have just left. "However, it would be only like you to hide your worries from us, lest they should make us unhappy."
At this, it must be allowed to her credit, Kit feels some strong twinges of remorse,—not enough, however, to compel confession.
"It is really hardly worth talking about," she says, alluding to the headache; and this, at all events, is the strict truth.
CHAPTER XIV.
How Kit's plot is betrayed, and how a walk that begins gayly ends in gloom.
The road to Mrs. Daly's is full of beauty. On one side of it runs Coole, its trees rich with leafy branches; upon the other stretches a common, green and soft, with a grand glimpse of the ocean far down below it.
"Why walk on the dusty road when those fields are green in there?" says Kit, pointing to Coole; and, after a faint hesitation, Monica follows her over the wall and into the dark recesses of the woods. The grass is knee deep in ferns and trailing verdure; great clumps of honeysuckle, falling from giant limbs of elm, make the air sweet. Some little way to their right—but where they cannot see because of the prodigality of moss and alder and bracken—a little hidden brook runs merrily, making