“No,” Bessie replied, beginning to feel a great pity for Neil, who had suffered so much.  “No, and I am glad you have told me, for I thought—­I feared you were ashamed of us, and it hurt me a little.”

There was a tremor in her voice which made Neil tighten the clasp of his arm around her, while he bent his head so low that his hair touched her forehead, as he exclaimed: 

“Ashamed of you, Bessie!  Never!  How could I be ashamed of the dearest, sweetest little cousin a man ever had?  I tell you I am the victim of circumstances!”

And bending his head still lower, “the victim of circumstances” kissed the girlish lips, which kissed him back again in token of reconciliation, and restored faith in him.

Poor, tired Jack, dreaming that night that he was a circus-rider and jumping through a hoop for Bessie’s pleasure, would have felt that all his fatigue and back ache, and the plaster which caused him so much discomfort, might have been spared, or at least were wasted on the girl with whom the kiss given in the deepening twilight was more powerful than all he had done for her, could he have known of that scene in the gardens.  But he did not know of it, and at a comparatively early hour next morning he was at Mrs. Buncher’s, where Bessie greeted him with her sweetest smile and thanked him again for all he had done for them.

“Don’t speak of it, I beg; it is so very little, I only wish there was really something I could do to prove my willingness to serve you,” he said.

They were standing alone by the window looking into the street, and as Jack said this there came a troubled look on Bessie’s face, find after waiting a moment, she said: 

“There is something you can do, if you will:  something which will please me very much, and prove you the good man I believe you to be.”

“Command me, and it is done,” Jack said; and Bessie continued: 

“If you ever meet mother again at Monte Carlo, or anywhere, don’t play with her for money; promise me this.”

“I promise,” Jack answered, unhesitatingly; and, emboldened by his promptness, Bessie went on: 

“And, oh, Mr. Trevellian, if you would never again play with any one for money, even the smallest sum.  It is gambling just the same; it is wicked; it leads to so much that is bad.  It was my grandfather’s ruin, and he knew it and repented bitterly, for it left his son nothing but poverty, and that is why we are so poor, father and I; gambling did it all.”

There were tears in Bessie’s eyes, and they went straight to Jack’s heart.  He was not an inveterate gambler, though he had lost and won large sums at Monte Carlo and Baden Baden, when the tables were open there, and, like most Englishmen, he never played whist that something was not staked; it gave zest to the game, which to him would be very insipid without it:  but Bessie’s eyes could have made him face the cannon’s mouth, if need be, and he said to her at once: