he bent down all at once and kissed the shabby sleeve.

"No," she said, looking up the next minute with her eyes as bright
as stars. "We have been _given_ to each other, that is it. It was n't
chance, it was something higher. We needed each other, and a higher
power than Fate bound us together, and it was a power that is n't cruel
enough to separate us now, after all these years have woven our lives in
one chord, and drawn our hearts close, and taught us how to comfort and
bear with each other. I was given to you because I could help to make
your life brighter,--and you were given to me because you could help to
brighten mine, and God will never part us so long as we are true."

The coat sleeve came into requisition again then, as it often did. Her
enthusiastic burst ended in a gush of heart-full tears, and she hid her
face on the coat sleeve until they were shed; Griffith in the mean time
touching her partly bent head caressingly with his hand, but remaining
silent because he could not trust himself to speak.

But she became quieter at last, and got over it so far as to look up and
smile.

"I could n't give up the six-roomed house and the green sofa, Griffith,"
she said. "They are like a great many other things,--the more I don't
get them the more I want them. And the long winter evenings we are to
spend together, when you are to read and I am to sew, and we are both to
be blissfully happy. I could n't give those up on any account. And how
could I bear to see Ralph Gowan, or any one else, seated in the orthodox
arm-chair?"

The very idea of this latter calamity occurring crushed Griffith
completely. The long winter evenings they were to spend together were
such a pleasant legend. Scarcely a day passed without his drawing a
mental picture of the room which was to be their parlor, and of the
fireside Dolly was to adorn. It required only a slight effort of
imagination to picture her shining in the tiny room whose door closed
upon an outside world of struggling and an inside world of love and
hope and trust. He imagined Dolly under a variety of circumstances,
but nothing pleased and touched him so tenderly as this fireside
picture,--its ideal warmth and glow, and its poetic placing of Dolly
as his wife sitting near to him with her smiles and winsome ways
and looks--his own, at last, unshared by any outsiders. Giving that
long-cherished fancy up would have killed him, if he could have borne
all the rest. And while thes