ave me here."

"Look here, my dear," he said, looking at her now. "I am not going to
take you to Tibet, or on any of my big journeys. I never had the
slightest intention of doing so, and never meant you to think I had. A
pretty thing if I were to risk the life of the one most precious to me,
as well as my own, in such journeys as I take!"

"Then what about me?" asked Cicely. "What am I to do while you are away,
risking your own life, as you say, and away perhaps for two or three
years together?"

"Would you be very anxious for me?" he asked her, with a tender look,
but she brushed the question aside impatiently.

"I am to live alone, while you go away," she said, "live just as dull a
life as I did before, only away from my own people, and without anything
that made my life pleasant in spite of its dulness. Is that what you are
offering me?"

"No, no," he said, trying to soothe her. "I want you to live in the
sweetest little country place. We'll find one together. You needn't stay
here a minute longer than you want to, though when we are in London
together it will be convenient. I want to think of you amongst your
roses, and to come back to you and forget all the loneliness and
hardships. I want a home, and you in it, the sweetest wife ever a man
had."

"I don't want that," she said at once. "You are offering me nothing that
I didn't have before, and I left it all to come to you--to share the
hardships and--and--I would take away the loneliness."

"You are making too much of my big journeys," he broke in on her
eagerly. "That is the trouble. Now listen to me. I shall be starting for
Tibet in March, and----"

"Did you know that when you told me you were going in a fortnight?" she
interrupted him.

"Let me finish," he said, holding up his hand. "It is settled now that I
am going to Tibet in March, and I shan't be away for more than a year.
Until then we will travel together. I want to go to Switzerland almost
directly to test some instruments. You will come with me, and you can
learn to climb. I don't mind that sort of hardship for you. At the end
of October we will go to America. I hadn't meant to go, but I want money
now--for you--and I can get it there. That's business; and for pleasure
we will go anywhere you like--Spain, Algiers, Russia--Riviera, if you
like, though I don't care for that sort of thing. When I go to Tibet
I'll leave you as mistress of a little house that you may be proud of,
and you'll wait