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THE SNAKE'S PASS.

ask you when we meet on our wedding morning if you are satisfied."

When it was time to go home we rose up, and—it might have been that the evening was chilly—a cold feeling came over me, as though I still stood in the shadow of the fateful hill. And there in the Cliff Fields I kissed Norah Joyce for the last time!

The two years sped quickly enough, although my not being able to see Norah at all was a great trial to me. Often and often I felt tempted almost beyond endurance to go quietly and hang round where she was so that I might get even a passing glimpse of her; but I felt that such would not be loyal to my dear girl. It was hard not to be able to tell her, even now and again, how I loved her, but it had been expressly arranged—and wisely enough too—that I should only write in such a manner as would pass, if necessary, the censorship of the schoolmistress. "I must be," said Norah to me, "exactly as the other girls are—and, of course, I must be subject to the same rules." And so it was that my letters had to be of a tempered warmth, which caused me now and again considerable pain.

My dear girl wrote to me regularly, and although there was not any of what her schoolmistress would call "love" in her letters, she always kept me posted in all her doings; and with every letter it was borne in on me that her heart and feelings were unchanged.