Nell, of Shorne Mills; or, One Heart's Burden. Charles Garvice

held the pencil up, as if he were offering it by auction.

      Nell hesitated, then she held out her hand without a word. He dropped the battered pencil case into it, and his bantering tone changed instantly.

      "Thank you!" he said gravely, earnestly. "I—I was afraid that you were going to refuse, and—well, that would have hurt me. And that would have hurt you; for I know how gentle-hearted you are, Miss Nell."

      Her hand closed over the pencil case tightly until the silver grew warm, then she slipped the thing into her pocket.

      "Please observe," he said, after a pause, during which he lit a cigarette, "that I am not in need of any token as a reminder. I am not likely to forget—Shorne Mills."

      He turned on his elbow and gazed at the jetty and the cottages which straggled up from it in the narrow ravine to the heights above, to the unique and quaint village upon which the still hot sun was shining as the boat danced toward it.

      "No. I shan't find it difficult to remember—or regret."

      He stifled a sigh. A sigh rose to her lips also, but she checked it, and forced a smile.

      "One does not break one's arm every day, and it is not easy to forget that," she said; "and yet, I dare say you will remember Shorne Mills. I don't think you will see many prettier places. Isn't it quite lovely this evening, with the sun shining on the cliffs and making old Brownie's windows glitter—like—like the diamonds in mamma's bracelet?"

      She laughed with a girlish mischievousness, and ran on rapidly, as if she must talk, as if a pause were to be averted as a peril.

      "I've heard people say that there is only one other place in the world like it—Cintra, in Portugal, isn't it?"

      He nodded. He was gazing at the picturesque little place, the human nests stuck like white stones in the cleft of the cliffs; and something more than the beauty of Shorne Mills was stirring, almost oppressing, his heart. He had stayed at, and departed from, many a place as beautiful in other ways as this, and had left it with some little regret, perhaps, but never with the dull, aching feeling such as weighed upon him this evening.

      "And at night it's lovelier still," went on Nell cheerfully, after a snatch of song, just sung under her breath, to show how happy and free from care she was at that moment. "To sail in on the tide of an autumn evening when the lights have been lit, and every cottage looks like a lantern; and the blue haze hangs over the village, and the children's voices come floating over the water as if through a mist; then, on nights like that, the sea is all phosphorescent, and the boat leaves a line of silvery light in its wake; and one seems to have all the world to oneself——"

      She stopped suddenly and sighed unconsciously. Was she thinking that, when that autumn night came, and Drake Vernon was not with her, she would indeed have all the world to herself, and that all the world is all the nicer when one has a companion? He lowered his eyes to her face.

      "That was a pretty picture," he said, in a low voice. "I shall think of that—wherever I may be in the autumn."

      Nell laughed as the boat ran beside the jetty slip, and she rose.

      "Do you think you will? Perhaps you will be too much amused, engrossed with whatever you are doing. I know I should be, if—if I were to leave Shorne Mills, and go into the big world."