ely on his arm.

"Haven't you a word to say to me? No answer? Not even a look?" She
waited a moment more. A marked change came over her. She turned slowly
to leave the summer-house. "I am sorry to have troubled you, Mr.
Delamayn. I won't detain you any longer."

He looked at her. There was a tone in her voice that he had never heard
before. There was a light in her eyes that he had never seen in them
before. Suddenly and fiercely he reached out his hand, and stopped her.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

She answered, looking him straight in the face, "Where many a miserable
woman has gone before me. Out of the world."

He drew her nearer to him, and eyed her closely. Even _his_ intelligence
discovered that he had brought her to bay, and that she really meant it!

"Do you mean you will destroy yourself?" he said.

"Yes. I mean I will destroy myself."

He dropped her arm. "By Jupiter, she _does_ mean it!"

With that conviction in him, he pushed one of the chairs in the
summer-house to her with his foot, and signed to her to take it. "Sit
down!" he said, roughly. She had frightened him--and fear comes seldom
to men of his type. They feel it, when it does come, with an angry
distrust; they grow loud and brutal, in instinctive protest against it.
"Sit down!" he repeated. She obeyed him. "Haven't you got a word to say
to me?" he asked, with an oath. No! there she sat, immovable, reckless
how it ended--as only women can be, when women's minds are made up.
He took a turn in the summer-house and came back, and struck his hand
angrily on the rail of her chair. "What do you want?"

"You know what I want."

He took another turn. There was nothing for it but to give way on
his side, or run the risk of something happening which might cause an
awkward scandal, and come to his father's ears.

"Look here, Anne," he began, abruptly. "I have got something to
propose."

She looked up at him.

"What do you say to a private marriage?"

Without asking a single question, without making objections, she
answered him, speaking as bluntly as he had spoken himself:

"I consent to a private marriage."

He began to temporize directly.

"I own I don't see how it's to be managed--"

She stopped him there.

"I do!"

"What!" he cried out, suspiciously. "You have thought of it yourself,
have you?"

"Yes."

"And planned for it?"

"And planned for it!"

"Why didn't you tell me so before?"

She answered haughtily; insist