s of a woman in love.

During the farm breakfast, hurried through by candle-light, with rain
beating on the windows, Rachel was thinking--"Why didn't _he_ propose
it?"--this scheme of marrying before he went. Wasn't it a most natural
thing to occur to him? She tormented herself all the morning with the
problem of his silence.

Then--as though in rebuke of her folly--at midday came a messenger, a boy
on a bicycle, with a letter. She took it up to her own room, and read it
with fluttering breath--laughing, yet with tears in her eyes.

"My Darling--What an idiot I was last night! This morning I have woke up
to a brilliant idea--why I didn't propose it to you yesterday I can't
imagine! Let us marry before I go. Meet me in London, a week to-day, and
let us go into the country, or to the sea, for a blessed forty-eight
hours, afterwards. Then you will see me off--and I shall know, wherever I
go, that you are my very, very own, and I am yours. I don't want to hurry
you. Take time to think, and write to me to-night, or wire me to-morrow
morning. But the very idea that you may say 'Yes' makes me the happiest
of men. Take time to think--but--all the same--don't keep me too long
waiting!

"Your own,

"G.E."

All day she kept the letter hidden in the loose front of her dress. "I'll
wire to-morrow morning," she thought. But before that--something had got
to happen. Every now and then she would pause in her own work to watch
Janet--Janet butter-making, Janet feeding the calves, Janet cooking--for
on that homely figure in white cap and apron everything seemed to depend.

The frost had come, and clear skies with it. The day passed in various
miscellaneous business, under shelter, in the big barn.

And at night, after supper, Rachel stood on the front steps looking into
a wide starry heaven, moonless, cold, and still. Betty and Jenny had just
gone up to bed. Janet was in the kitchen, putting the porridge for the
morrow's breakfast which she had just made into the hay-box, which would
keep it steaming all night. But she would soon have done work. The moment
seemed to have come.

Rachel walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. The supper
had been cleared away and the table on which they had eaten it shone
spotlessly clean and bare. The fire would soon be raked out for the
night, and Janet would lay the breakfast before she left the kitchen.
Everything was in the neatest possible order, and the brilliant polish of