"Give it to me!" cries she, impulsively, her voice, trembling. "It is the missing will. You found it last night. It belongs to Nicholas. You must--nay," softly, beseechingly, "you _will_ give it to me."

"Do you know all you ask? By relinquishing this iniquitous deed I give up all hope of ever gaining this place,--this old house that even to me seems priceless. You demand much. Yet on one condition it shall be yours."

"And the condition?" asks she, eagerly, going closer to him. What is it that she would not do to restore happiness to those she has learned to love so well?

"A simple one."

"Name it!" exclaims she, seeing he still hesitates.

He lays his hands lightly on her arm, yet his touch seems to burn through her gown into her very flesh. He stoops towards her.

"For one kiss this deed shall be yours," he whispers, "to do what you like with it."

Mona starts violently, and draws back; shame and indignation cover her.

Her breath comes in little gasps.

"Are you a man, to make me such a speech?" she says, pa.s.sionately, fixing her eyes upon him with withering contempt.

"You have heard me," retorts he, coldly, angered to the last degree by the extreme horror and disgust she has evinced at his proposal. He deliberately replaces the precious paper in his pocket, and turns as if to go.

"Oh, stay?" she says, faintly, detaining him both by word and gesture.

He turns to her again.

She covers her eyes with her hands, and tries vainly to decide on what is best for her to do. In all the books she has ever read the young woman placed in her position would not have hesitated at all. As if reared to the situation, she would have thrown up her head, and breathing defiance upon the tempter, would have murmured to the sympathetic air, "Honor above everything," and so, full of dignity, would have moved away from her discomfited companion, her nose high in the air. She would think it a righteous thing that all the world should suffer rather than one tarnish, however slight, should sully the brightness of her fame.

For the first time Mona learns she is not like this well-regulated young woman. She falls lamentably short of such excellence. She cannot bring herself to think the world of those she loves well lost for any consideration whatever. And after all--this horrid condition--it would be over in a moment. And she could run home with the coveted paper, and bathe her face in sweet cold water. And then again she shudders. Could she bathe the remembrance of the insult from her heart?

She presses her hands still closer against her eyes, as though to shut out from her own mind the hatefulness of such a thought. And then, with a fresh effort, she brings herself back once more to the question that lies before her.

Oh, if by this one act of self-sacrifice she could restore the Towers with all its beauty and richness to Nicholas, and--and his mother,--how good a thing it would be! But will Geoffrey ever forgive her? Ah, sure when she explains the matter to him, and tells him how and why she did it, and how her heart bled in the doing of it, he will put his arms round her and pardon her sin. Nay, more, he may see how tender is the longing that compels her to the deed.

She uncovers her eyes, and glances for a bare instant at Rodney. Then once more the heavily-fringed lids close upon the dark-blue eyes, as if to hide the anguish in them, and in a smothered voice she says, with clenched teeth and a face like marble, "Yes, you may kiss me,--if you will."

There is a pause. In shrinking doubt she awaits the moment that shall make him take advantage of her words. But that moment never comes. In vain she waits. At length she lifts her eyes, and he, flinging the parchment at her feet, cries, roughly,--

"There! take it. _I_ can be generous too."

"But," begins Mona, feebly, hardly sure of her blessed release.

"Keep your kiss," exclaims he, savagely, "since it cost you such an effort to give it, and keep the parchment too. It is yours because of my love for you."

Ashamed of his vehemence, he stoops, and, raising the will from the ground, presents it to her courteously. "Take it: it is yours," he says.

Mona closes her fingers on it vigorously, and by a last effort of grace suppresses the sigh of relief that rises from her heart.

Instinctively she lowers her hand as though to place the doc.u.ment in the inside pocket of her coat, and in doing so comes against something that plainly startles her.

"I quite forgot it," she says, coloring with sudden fear, and then slowly, cautiously, she draws up to view the hated pistol he had left in the library the night before. She holds it out to him at arm's length, as though it is some noisome reptile, as doubtless indeed she considers it. "Take it," she says; "take it quickly. I brought it to you, meaning to return it. Good gracious! fancy my forgetting it! Why, it might have gone off and killed me, and I should have been none the wiser."

"Well, I think you would, for a moment or two at least," returns he, smiling grimly, and dropping the dangerous little toy with some carelessness into his own pocket.

"Oh, do take care!" cries Mona, in an agony: "it is loaded. If you throw it about in that rough fashion, it will certainly go off and do you some injury."

"Blow me to atoms, perhaps, or into some region unknown," says he, recklessly. "A good thing, too. Is life so sweet a possession that one need quail before the thought of resigning it?"

"You speak as one might who has no aim in life, says Mona, looking at him with sincere pity. When Mona looks piteous she is at her best. Her eyes grow large, her sweet lips tremulous, her whole face pathetic. The _role_ suits her. Rodney's heart begins to beat with dangerous rapidity.

It is quite on the cards that a man of his reckless, untrained, dare-devil disposition should fall madly in love with a woman _sans peur et sans reproche_.

"An aim!" he says, bitterly. "I think I have found an end to my life where most fellows find a beginning."

"By and you will think differently," says Mona, believing he alludes to his surrender of the Rodney property "You will get over this disappointment."

"I shall,--when death claims me," replies he.

"Nay, now," says Mona, sweetly, "do not talk like that. It grieves me.

When you have formed a purpose worth living for, the whole world will undergo a change for you. What is dark now will seem light then; and death will be an enemy, a thing to battle with, to fight with desperately until one's latest breath. In the meantime," nervously, "_do_ be cautious about that horrid weapon: won't you, now?"

"You ask me no questions about last night," he says, suddenly; "and there is something I must say to you. Get rid of that fellow Ridgway, the under-gardener. It was he opened the library window for me. He is untrustworthy, and too fond of filthy lucre ever to come to good. I bribed him."

He is now speaking with some difficulty, and is looking, not at her, but at the pattern he is drawing on the soft loam at his feet.

"Bribed him?" says Mona, in an indescribable tone.

"Yes. I knew about the secret panel from Warden, old Elspeth's nephew, who alone, I think, knew of its existence. I was determined to get the will. It seemed to me," cries he, with sudden excitement, "no such great crime to do away with an unrighteous deed that took from an elder son (without just cause) his honest rights, to bestow them upon the younger.

What had my father done? Nothing! His brother, by treachery and base subterfuge, supplanted him, and obtained his birthright, while he, my father, was cast out, disinherited, without a hearing."

His pa.s.sion carries Mona along with it.

"It was unjust, no doubt; it sounds so," she says, faintly. Yet even as she speaks she closes her little slender fingers resolutely upon the parchment that shall restore happiness to Nicholas and dear pretty Dorothy.

"To return to Ridgway," says Paul Rodney, pulling himself up abruptly.

"See him yourself, I beg of you, as a last favor, and dismiss him. Send him over to me: I will take him back with me to Australia and give him a fresh start in life. I owe him so much, as I was the first to tempt him into the wrong path; yet I doubt whether he would have kept straight even had he not met me. He is _mauvais sujet_ all through."

"Surely," thinks Mona to herself, "this strange young man is not altogether bad. He has his divine touches as well as another."

"I will do as you ask," she says, wondering when the interview will come to an end.

"After all, I am half glad Nicholas is not to be routed," he says, presently, with some weariness in his tone. "The game wasn't worth the candle; I should never have been able to do the _grand seigneur_ as he does it. I suppose I am not to the manner born. Besides, I bear _him_ no malice."

His tone, his emphasis on the p.r.o.noun, is significant.

"Why should you bear malice to any one?" says Mona uneasily.

"Your husband called me 'thief.' I have not forgotten that," replies he, gloomily, the dark blood of his mother's race rushing to his cheek. "I shall remember that insult to my dying day. And let him remember _this_, that if ever I meet him again, alone, and face to face, I shall kill him for that word only."

"Oh, no! no!" says Mona, shrinking from him. "Why cherish such revenge in your heart? Would you kill me too, that you speak like this? Fling such thoughts far from you, and strive after good. Revenge is the food of fools."

"Well, at least I sha'n't have many more opportunities of meeting him,"