at once
offering to him the use of her purse.

"Of course you will help me," he said. "I am full of plans, all of
which you must share with me. But now, at this moment, my one great
plan is that in which you have already consented to be my partner.
Alice, you are my wife now. Tell me that it will make you happy to
call me your husband."

Not for worlds could she have said so at this moment. It was
ill-judged in him to press her thus. He should already have seen,
with half an eye, that no such triumph as that which he now demanded
could be his on this occasion. He had had his triumph when, in the
solitude of his own room, with quiet sarcasm he had thrown on one
side of him the letter in which she had accepted him, as though the
matter had been one almost indifferent to him. He had no right to
expect the double triumph. Then he had frankly told himself that her
money would be useful to him. He should have been contented with
that conviction, and not have required her also to speak to him soft
winning words of love.

"That must be still distant, George," she said. "I have suffered so
much!"

"And it has been my fault that you have suffered; I know that. These
years of misery have been my doing." It was, however, the year of
coming misery that was the most to be dreaded.

"I do not say that," she replied, "nor have I ever thought it. I have
myself and myself only to blame." Here he altogether misunderstood
her, believing her to mean that the fault for which she blamed
herself had been committed in separating herself from him on that
former occasion.

"Alice, dear, let bygones be bygones."

"Bygones will not be bygones. It may be well for people to say so,
but it is never true. One might as well say so to one's body as to
one's heart. But the hairs will grow grey, and the heart will grow
cold."

"I do not see that one follows upon the other," said George. "My hair
is growing very grey;"--and to show that it was so, he lifted the
dark lock from the side of his forehead, and displayed the incipient
grizzling of the hair from behind. "If grey hairs make an old man,
Alice, you will marry an old husband; but even you shall not be
allowed to say that my heart is old."

That word "husband," which her cousin had twice used, was painful to
Alice's ear. She shrunk from it with palpable bodily suffering. Marry
an old husband! His age was nothing to the purpose, though he had
been as old as Enoch. But she was again obliged