ray what he felt, and all
that he felt. "If what this man says is true, then I am a penniless
nonentity whom you are not going to marry."

"You are talking nonsense, Luke, and you know it," was all she said.
And she said it very quietly, very decisively. He was talking
nonsense, of course, for, whatever happened or didn't happen, there
was one thing in the world that was absolutely, undeniably impossible,
and that was that she should not marry Luke.

Whilst she Louisa Harris, plain, uninteresting, commonplace Louisa
Harris was of this world, her marriage with Luke must be. People, in
this present day, matter-of-fact world, didn't have their hearts
wrenched out of them; they were not made to suffer impossible and
unendurable tortures; then why should she Louisa Harris, be threatened
with such a cataclysm?

"I am not," he was saying rather tonelessly, "talking nonsense, Lou. I
have thought all that over. It's over eight days since that letter
came; eight times twenty-four hours since I seemed in a way to see all
my future through a thick, black cloud, and I've had time to think. I
saw you too, through that thick, black cloud--I saw you just as you
are, exquisite, beautiful, like a jewel that should forever remain in
a perfect setting. I----"

He broke off abruptly, and, mechanically, his hand went up to his
forehead and eyes. Where was he? He gave a sudden, quaint laugh.

"What a drivelling fool you must think me, Lou."

She looked straight at him, pure of soul, simple of heart, with a
passion of tenderness and self-abnegation as yet dormant beneath the
outer crust of a conventional education and of commonplace
surroundings, but with the passion there nevertheless. And it was
expressed in the sudden, strange luminosity of her eyes--I would not
have you think that they were tears--as they met and held his own.

They didn't say anything more just then. People of their type and
class in England do not say much, you know, under such circumstances.
They have been drilled not to: drilled and drilled from childhood
upward, from the time when, after a fall and a cut lip or broken
tooth, the tears have to be held back, lest the words "snivel" or
"cry-baby" be mentioned. But quietude does not necessarily mean
freedom from pain. A cut lip hurts worse when it is not wetted with
tears.

It was only the shadow that was hovering over these two as yet:
nothing really tangible. And the shadow was not between them. She
would not