he went on, hurriedly checking him with her hand,
"although I have laid aside all reserve and told you so much, remember
that I know your sentiments toward me already. I would not, believe
me, being nobly born, weary you with importunities into consent. I too
have a pride of my own: and I declare before the holy mother of God, if
you should now go back from your word already given, I would no more
marry you than I would marry my uncle's groom."

Denis smiled a little bitterly.

"It is a small love," he said, "that shies at a little pride."

She made no answer, although she probably had her own thoughts.

"Come hither to the window," he said with a sigh. "Here is the dawn."

And indeed the dawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky was
full of essential daylight, colorless and clean; and the valley
underneath was flooded with a gray reflection. A few thin vapors clung
in the coves of the forest or lay along the winding course of the
river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of stillness, which
was hardly interrupted when the cocks began once more to crow among the
steadings. Perhaps the same fellow who had made so horrid a clangor in
the darkness not half an hour before, now sent up the merriest cheer to
greet the coming day. A little wind went bustling and eddying among
the treetops underneath the windows. And still the daylight kept
flooding insensibly out of the east, which was soon to grow
incandescent and cast up that red-hot cannon-ball, the rising sun.
Denis looked out over all this with a bit of a shiver. He had taken
her hand, and retained it in his almost unconsciously.

"Has the day begun already?" she said; and then, illogically enough:
"the night has been so long! Alas! what shall we say to my uncle when
he returns?"

"What you will," said Denis, and he pressed her fingers in his.

She was silent.

"Blanche," he said, with a swift uncertain passionate utterance, "you
have seen whether I fear death. You must know well enough that I would
as gladly leap out of that window into the empty air as lay a finger on
you without your free and full consent. But if you care for me at all
do not let me lose my life in a misapprehension; for I love you better
than the whole world; and though I will die for you blithely, it would
be like all the joys of Paradise to live on and spend my life in your
service."

As he stopped speaking, a bell began to ring loudly in the interior of
the ho