"Nothing easier, darling. Only a mile and a half from here is the little fishing village of Brandon. We can take your little skiff and go down, be married by the Methodist minister there, and return in a few hours, and then I can leave you without being haunted by a terrible foreboding of losing you forever. They will think you are asleep in your room at home, and no one will miss you or be the wiser for the precious little secret that we will keep sacredly until I come to claim my little wife. Bonnibel, will you make this great sacrifice for love? It will make our future happiness secure."
"Yes," she whispered, without a moment's thought.
[CHAPTER V.]
The fairy little bark, the Bonnibel, swept blithely out into the moonlighted waves.
Bonnibel tied her lace handkerchief over her head, and wrapped the shawl about her shoulders.
Somehow her heart began to grow lighter. This moonlight flitting seemed so sweet and romantic.
Her dark-eyed lover sitting opposite lightly swaying the oars looked handsome as a demi-god to her partial eyes. She trusted him implicitly.
"The king can do no wrong," was her motto.
"You shall never regret this step, never, my darling," Leslie Dane kept saying to her over and over, as if to soothe his conscience, which perhaps reproached him.