ou for the past. I want you
yourself, for myself, as my wife. I swear to God if you won't marry me I
will marry no one. You are the only woman I can speak to, the only one
who does not fail, who holds on through thick and thin, the only one who
has ever really wanted me. I daresay I shan't make you happy. I daresay
I shall break your heart. God help me, I daresay I shall put my
convenience before your happiness, my selfish whims before your health.
I have always put myself first. But risk it. Risk it, Magdalen. Take me
back. Love me. For God's sake marry me."

Each looked into the other's bared soul.

Something in his desperate face which she had always sought for, which
had always been missing from it--she found.

"I will," she said.

They made no movement towards each other. They had reached a spiritual
nearness, a passion of surrender each to each, which touch of hand or
lip could only at that moment have served to lessen.

"You are not taking me out of pity? You are sure you can still love me a
little?"

"More than in the early days," she said. "For you have not only come to
me, Everard. You have come to yourself."

CHAPTER XXIX

Me, too, with mastering charm
From husks of dead days freeing,
The sun draws up to be warm
And to bloom in this sweet hour.
The stem of all my being
Waited to bear this flower.

--LAURENCE BINYON.

It would be hardly possible to describe the unholy, the unmeasured
rejoicing to which Magdalen's engagement gave rise in her family. It is,
perhaps, enough to say that the twenty years of her cheerful, selfless
devotion to the domestic hearth had never won from her father and her
two aunts anything like the admiring approval which her engagement at
once elicited. The neighbourhood was interested. Lord Lossiemouth was a
brilliant match for anyone (if you left out the man himself). The
announcement read impressively in the _Morning Post_. The neighbours
remembered that there had been a youthful attachment, an early
engagement broken off owing to lack of means. And now it seemed the
moment he was rich he had come flying back to cast his faithful heart
once more at her feet. It was a real romance. Magdalen was considered an
extraordinarily fortunate woman by the whole countryside, but Lord
Lossiemouth was placed on a pedestal. What touching constancy. What
beautiful fidelity. What a contrast to "most men." "Not one man in a
hundred would