ing?" he said.

"That depends," she answered.

"Are you going to marry Mr. Rangely?"

"No," she said, and turned away. "Why did you think that?"

He quivered.

"Victoria!"

She looked up at him, swiftly, half revealed, her eyes like stars
surprised by the flush of dawn in her cheeks. Hope quickened at the
vision of hope, the seats of judgment themselves were filled with
radiance, and rumour, cowered and fled like the spirit of night. He could
only gaze, enraptured.

"Yes?" she answered.

His voice was firm but low, yet vibrant with sincerity, with the vast
store of feeling, of compelling magnetism that was in the man and moved
in spite of themselves those who knew him. His words Victoria remembered
afterwards--all of them; but it was to the call of the voice she
responded. His was the fibre which grows stronger in times of crisis.
Sure of himself, proud of the love which he declared, he spoke as a man
who has earned that for which he prays,--simply and with dignity.

"I love you," he said; "I have known it since I have known you, but you
must see why I could not tell you so. It was very hard, for there were
times when I led myself to believe that you might come to love me. There
were times when I should have gone away if I hadn't made a promise to
stay in Ripton. I ask you to marry me, because I--know that I shall love
you as long as I live. I can give you this, at least, and I can promise
to protect and cherish you. I cannot give you that to which you have been
accustomed all your life, that which you have here at Fairview, but I
shouldn't say this to you if I believed that you cared for them above
--other things."

"Oh, Austen!" she cried, "I do not--I--do not! They would be hateful to
me--without you. I would rather live with you--at Jabe Jenney's," and her
voice caught in an exquisite note between laughter and tears. "I love
you, do you understand, you! Oh, how could you ever have doubted it? How
could you? What you believe, I believe. And, Austen, I have been so
unhappy for three days."

He never knew whether, as the most precious of graces ever conferred upon
man, with a womanly gesture she had raised her arms and laid her hands
upon his shoulders before he drew her to him and kissed her face, that
vied in colour with the coming glow in the western sky. Above the prying
eyes of men, above the world itself, he held her, striving to realize
some little of the vast joy of this possession, and failing. A