ead, and garden scents creeping out on the damp
air, Margaret said, with a sort of breathless catch in her voice:--

"You know I do!" And with the words the fright left her eyes, and
happy tears filled them, and she raised her face to his.

Coming back from the train half an hour later, she walked between a
new heaven and a new earth! The friendly stars seemed just overhead; a
thousand delicious odors came from garden beds and recently watered
lawns. She moved through the confusion that always attended the
settling down of the Pagets for the night, like one in a dream, and
was glad to find herself at last lying in the darkness beside the
sleeping Rebecca again. Now, now, she could think!

But it was all too wonderful for reasonable thought. Margaret clasped
both her hands against her rising heart. He loved her. She could think
of the very words he had used in telling her, over and over again. She
need no longer wonder and dream and despair: he had said it. He loved
her, had loved her from the very first. His old aunt suspected it, and
his chum suspected it, and he had thought Margaret knew it. And beside
him in that brilliant career that she had followed so wistfully in her
dreams, Margaret saw herself, his wife. Young and clever and good to
look upon,--yes, she was free to-night to admit herself all these good
things for his sake!--and his wife, mounting as he mounted beside the
one man in the world she had elected to admire and love. "Doctor and
Mrs. John Tenison "--so it would be written. "Doctor Tenison's wife"--"This
is Mrs. Tenison"--she seemed already to hear the magical sound
of it!

Love--what a wonderful thing it was! How good God was to send this
best of all gifts to her! She thought how it belittled the other good
things of the world. She asked no more of life, now; she was loved by
a good man, and a great man, and she was to be his wife. Ah, the happy
years together that would date from to-night,--Margaret was thrilling
already to their delights. "For better or worse," the old words came
to her with a new meaning. There would be no worse, she said to
herself with sudden conviction,--how could there be? Poverty,
privation, sickness might come,--but to bear them with John,--to
comfort and sustain him, to be shut away with him from all the world
but the world of their own four walls,--why, that would be the
greatest happiness of all! What hardship could be hard that knitted
their two hearts closer together