"No; I can't hear—no; but he will be here immediately. We must not be out, you know; he may ask for me, and he is so—so very—what shall I say?"
Margaret did not mind. She turned a wild and plaintive look upward towards the struggling moon—now emerging, now lost again.
"Come, darling—let us go," said Margaret.
And she looked round her gently, as if awaking from a dream.
"Yes, darling, come," she continued, placing her hand on Anne Sheckleton's arm.
"And you are not to tease yourself, Margaret, dear, with fancies and follies. As I said before, you ought to be one of the happiest girls in existence."
"So I am," she answered, dreamily—"very happy—oh! wonderfully happy—but there is the feeling of something—fatal, as I said; and, be it what it may, let it come. I could not lose him now, for all the world."
She was looking up, as she spoke, towards the broken moonlight, herself as pale, and a strange plaintive smile of rapture broke over her beautiful face, as if answering the smile of a spirit in the air.
"Come quickly, darling, come," whispered Miss Sheckleton, and they walked side by side in silence to the house, and so to Margaret's room, where she sat down by the window, looking out, and kind Anne Sheckleton sat by the table, with her thin old hand to her cheek, watching her fondly, and awaiting an opportunity to speak, for she was longing to hear a great deal more.