riods are just like that."

"How volatile you are! One minute you are so serious and the next so
frivolous that I fail to follow you. I often think that you must have
some foreign blood in your veins, you are so utterly different from the
typical, stolid, shy, self-conscious English-woman."

"I hope you don't think I was made in Germany, like cheap china and
imitation Astrakhan."

"Heaven forbid! The Germans are more stolid and serious than the
English. But you must have a Celtic ancestor in you somewhere. Haven't
you?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, my great-grandmother was a Manxwoman; but
we are ashamed to talk much about her, because it sounds as if she'd had
no tail."

"Then you must have inherited your temperament from her. But now I want
to talk to you seriously about doing something for the men who work in
the coal-pits, and who--more even than the rest of their class--are shut
out from the joy and beauty of the world. Their lives not only are made
hideous, but are also shortened, by the nature of their toil. Do you
know what the average life of a miner is?"

"Of course I do: twenty-one years."

Alan frowned; he disapproved of jokes even more than of creeds, and
understood them equally. "Miss Farringdon, you are not behaving fairly
to me. You know what I mean well enough, but you wilfully misunderstand
my words for the sake of laughing at them. But I will make you listen,
all the same. I want to know if you will help me in my work by becoming
my wife; and I think that even you can not help answering that question
seriously."

The laughter vanished from Elisabeth's face, as if it had been wiped out
with a sponge. "Oh! I--I don't know," she murmured lamely.

"Then you must find out. To me it seems that you are the one woman in
all the world who was made for me. Your personality attracted me the
first moment that I met you; and our subsequent companionship has proved
that our minds habitually run in the same grooves, and that we naturally
look at things from the same standpoint. That is so, is it not?"

"Yes."

"The only serious difference between us seemed to be the difference of
faith. You had been trained in the doctrines of one of the strictest
sects, while I had outgrown all dogmas and thrown aside all recognised
forms of religion. So strong were my feelings on this point, that I
would not have married any woman who still clung to the worn-out and (by
me) disused traditions; but I fancy that I ha