ppy.

"And so you think you love me!" he said at last, speaking so sadly, and
clasping the hand he held with so faint a pressure, that Jenny would
have been offended if she had not been the dear, trustful little
creature she was.

There was, indeed, a slight reproach in her accent as she answered,
"_Think_ I love you, Hobert? No, I don't think anything about it,--I
_know_."

"And I know I love you, Jenny," he replied. "I love you so well that I
am going to leave you without asking you to marry me!"

For one moment Jenny was silent,--for one moment the world seemed
unsteady beneath her,--then she stood up, and, taking the hand of her
lover between her palms, gazed into his face with one long, earnest,
steadfast gaze. "You have asked me already, Hobert," she said, "a
thousand times, and I have consented as often. You may go away, but you
will not leave me; for 'Whither thou goest I will go, where thou diest
will I die, and there will I be buried.'"

He drew her close to his bosom now, and kissed her with most passionate,
but still saddest tenderness. "You know not, my darling," he said, "what
you would sacrifice." Then he laid before her all her present
advantages, all her bright prospects for the future,--her high chamber
with its broad eastern windows, to be given up for the low dingy walls
of a settler's cabin, her free girlhood for the hard struggles of a
settler's wife! Sickness, perhaps,--certainly the lonesome nights and
days of a home remote from neighbors, and the dreariness and hardship
inseparable from the working out of better fortunes. But all these
things, even though they should all come, were light in comparison with
losing him!

Perhaps Hobert had desired and expected to hear her say this. At any
rate, he did not insist on a reversal of her decision, as, with his arms
about her, he proceeded to explain why he had come to her that night
with so heavy a heart. The substance of all he related may be
recapitulated in a few words. The land could not be paid for, and the
homestead must be sold. He would not be selfish and forsake his mother,
and his young brothers and sisters in their time of need. By careful
management of the little that could be saved, he might buy in the West a
better farm than that which was now to be given up; and there to build a
cabin and plant a garden would be easy,--O, so easy!--with the smile of
Jenny to light him home when the day's work was done.

In fact, the prospective