“You can give me what I value more,” she said.  “You can give me true and disinterested love.”

He did not forget his sister’s advice, that he should have that promise in writing.  One evening—­it was August then, when the fruit hung ripe on the trees—­he told her, with many sighs, that he should not see her again for some days.

“How am I to live through them, Marion, I do not know; now when I wake, my first thought is that I shall see you; all the world seems so fair and life so bright, because I shall see you.  What will happen to me when the morning sun brings no such delight?”

She was young and simple enough to feel very much touched with his words; the old idea of having his life in her hands never left her.

“Grant me a favor,” he said.  “I shall have no energy for work unless you promise it:  Write to me every night and in your letters tell me, sweet, that which I love best to hear, that you will marry me.”

So to make him happy, to give him life and energy for his work, she wrote to him every evening, and, remembering his request, in each one of those letters she repeated her promise to marry him.

This is no overstrained story, it is no exaggeration; hundreds of men have acted as Allan Lyster did, and hundreds will act so in the future.  When girls have once mastered the grand lesson that all secrecy—­all concealment is wrong, they will have taken the only precaution possible to save themselves.

So matters went on until the continued secrecy began to prey upon Marion’s mind; then she made an appeal to Allan with which our story opens.  He did his best to argue with her, and he sent a note to his sister, telling her the bright, bonnie bird they had ensnared was growing restive under constraint.

No doubts ever came to her.  Youth is the age of romance; youth imperatively demands love and poetry.  She had found both and was perfectly satisfied.  She believed honestly that she loved him very dearly; it never occurred to her that the greatest charm really was the excitement of having to plan interviews and arrange her letters so as to escape detection; it never occured to her that if she had been like other girls of her age in society, and so enabled to judge of people, so far from loving him and making a hero of him, he would have been distasteful to her.  She had had no opportunities of being able to judge.  Lord Ridsdale’s only idea was to keep her at school as long as possible, in order to escape further trouble.  She had never been in the society of gentlemen, and her head was full of romance and poetry.

Therefore she fell an easy victim to the artist and his sister.  She was ready to believe he was a great hero, because he was handsome; that he was all that could be noble and generous, because he talked poetry.  True, she began to dislike the concealment, but it never struck her that she disliked it because the whole affair was growing tiresome to her.