e you? Why, Bertha, I'd put my
hand in that fire to save you from a finger-ache. I'd jump into the
Weale there if I thought I could make you happy by doing it. I'd live my
whole life your servant for a smile a year.'

His eyes flashed or moistened with every phrase, his gestures were
superabundant and intense, and his voice was genuinely tender and
impassioned.

His ardent eyes and voice thrilled the girl, and yet she doubted him.
There was a fear in her mind which she could not shake away.

People in Beacon Hargate were not rich in opportunities for the study
of the acted drama, but Bertha had seen a play or two in the great town
hard by, and Lane looked and talked rather too much like a stage lover
to her mind. In the unreal life behind the footlights lovers talked with
just such a fluency, just such a tender fiery emphasis. In real life
John Thistlewood came doggedly a-wooing with a shoulder propped against
a doorpost, and had hard work to find a word for himself. If only that
one absent element of faith could be imported into the business, Lane
Protheroe's fashion of courting was certain to be infinitely more
delightful than John Thistlewood's, but then the absent element was
almost everything. And for poor Bertha the worst part of it seemed
that she loved the man she doubted, and could not love the man in whose
affection she held the profoundest faith. That the rough, clumsy, and
persistent courtier loved her was one of the indisputable facts of life
to her. She knew it just as surely as she knew that she was alive. She
knew it, and the knowledge hurt her, for she could fancy nothing less
hopeful than Thistle-wood's wooing, and she was without a spark of mere
vanity.

'I think it is because you say so much that I don't feel quite able to
believe it all,' she said. 'You feel it when you talk about it, but it
seems to me as if you _had_ to talk before you get to feel it.'

His brows bent down over gloomy eyes again, and he folded his arms as he
looked at her. Once more poor Bertha thought of the stage lover she had
seen, and a long-drawn sigh escaped her.

'I can't think it's all quite real,' she said, almost desperately.

'You think I say too much?' he retorted. 'It seems to me as if I said
too little. It seems to me as if there weren't any words to speak such
thoughts and feelings.'

'Is that because you don't value the words? 'she .' asked him. 'Don't
you think that if you felt what the words do mean that