t.
If you had broken your leg, how would you have borne it?"

"Like other people, I suppose."

"Would you have been angry with me?"

"I hope not. I am sure not. You were doing the best you could to give
me pleasure. I don't think I should have been angry at all. I don't
think we are ever angry with the people we really like."

"Do you really like me?"

"Yes;--I like you."

"Is that all?"

"Is not that enough?"

She answered the question as she might have answered it had it been
allowed to her, as to any girl that was free, to toy with his love,
knowing that she meant to accept it. It was easier so, than in any
other way. But her heart within her was sad, and could she have
stopped his further speech by any word rough and somewhat rude, she
would have done so. In truth, she did not know how to answer him
roughly. He deserved from her that all her words should be soft, and
sweet and pleasant. She believed him to be good and generous and kind
and loving. The hard things which Daniel Thwaite had said of him had
all vanished from her mind. To her thinking, it was no sin in him
that he should want her wealth,--he, the Earl, to whom by right the
wealth of the Lovels should belong. The sin was rather hers,--in that
she kept it from him. And then, if she could receive all that he
was willing to give, his heart, his name, his house and home, and
sweet belongings of natural gifts and personal advantages, how much
more would she take than what she gave! She could not speak to him
roughly, though,--alas!--the time had come in which she must speak to
him truly. It was not fitting that a girl should have two lovers.

"No, dear,--not enough," he said.

It can hardly be accounted a fault in him that at this time he felt
sure of her love. She had been so soft in her ways with him, so
gracious, yielding, and pretty in her manners, so manifestly pleased
by his company, so prone to lean upon him, that it could hardly be
that he should think otherwise. She had told him, when he spoke to
her more plainly up in London than he had yet done since they had
been together in the country, that she could never, never be his
wife. But what else could a girl say at a first meeting with a
proposed lover? Would he have wished that she should at once have
given herself up without one maidenly scruple, one word of feminine
recusancy? If love's course be made to run too smooth it loses all
its poetry, and half its sweetness. But now they knew