ach separately.

"Whether I love you? How can I, when I don't know myself? Perhaps at
the end I may be sure. When I lie a-dying you must come to me, and bend
over me, and say, 'Molly Bawn, do you love me?' And I shall whisper
back with my last breath, 'yes' or 'no,' as the case may be."

"Don't talk of dying," he says, with a shudder, tightening his clasp.

"Why not? as we must die."

"But not now, not while we are young and happy. Afterward, when old age
creeps on us and we look on love as weariness, it will not matter."

"To me, that is the horror of it," with a quick distasteful shiver,
leaning forward in her earnestness, "to feel that sooner or later there
will be no hope; that we _must_ go, whether with or without our
own will,--and it is never with it, is it?"

"Never, I suppose."

"It does not frighten me so much to think that in a month, or perhaps
next year, or at any moment, I may die,--there is a blessed uncertainty
about that,--but to know that, no matter how long I linger, the time
will surely come when no prayers, no entreaties, will avail. They say
of one who has cheated death for seventy years, that he has had a good
long life: taking that, then, as an average, I have just fifty-one
years to live, only half that to enjoy. Next year it will be fifty,
then forty-nine, and so on until it comes down to one. What shall I do
then?"

"My own darling, how fanciful you are! your hands have grown cold as
ice. Probably when you are seventy you will consider yourself a still
fascinating person of middle age, and look upon these thoughts of
to-day as the sickly fancies of an infant. Do not let us talk about it
any more. Your face is white."

"Yes," says Molly, recovering herself with a sigh, "it is the one thing
that horrifies me. John is religious, so is Letty, while I--oh, that I
could find pleasure in it! You see," speaking after a slight pause,
with a smile, "I am at heart a rebel, and hate to obey. Mind you never
give me an order! How good it would be to be young, and gay, and full
of easy laughter, always,--to have lovers at command, to have some one
at my feet forever!"

"'Some one,'" sadly. "Would any one do? Oh, Molly, can you not be
satisfied with me?"

"How can I be sure? At present--yes," running her fingers lightly down
the earnest, handsome face upraised to hers, apparently quite forgetful
of her late emotion.

"Well, at all events," says the young man, with the air of one who is
determi