"I do love you!"

"Then, in God's name, why should we not kiss? You are my love and
I am yours. Your father and mother are satisfied that it should be
so. Seeing that we are so, is it a disgrace to kiss? Having won your
heart, may I not have the delight of thinking that you would wish me
to be near you?"

"You must know it all," she said, "though it may be unwomanly to tell
so much."

"Know what?"

"There has never been a man whose touch has been pleasant to me;--but
I could revel in yours. Kiss you? I could kiss your feet at this
moment, and embrace your knees. Everything belonging to you is dear
to me. The things you have touched have been made sacred to me. The
Prayer-Book tells the young wife that she should love her husband
till death shall part them. I think my love will go further than
that."

"Isabel! Isabel!"

"Keep away from me! I will not even give you my hand to shake till
you have promised to be of one mind with me. I will not become your
wife."

"You shall become my wife!"

"Never! Never! I have thought it out, and I know that I am right.
Things have been hard with me."

"Not to me! They will not have been hard to me when I shall have
carried my point with you."

"I was forced to appear before your eyes as the heiress of my uncle."

"Has that made any difference with me?"

"And I was forced to refuse you in obedience to him who had adopted
me."

"I understand all that very completely."

"Then he made a new will, and left me some money."

"Of all that I know, I think, every particular."

"But the money is not there." At this he nodded his head as though
smiling at her absurdity in going back over circumstances which were
so well understood by both of them. "The money is offered to me by my
cousin, but I will not take it."

"As to that I have nothing to say. It is the one point on which, when
we are married, I shall decline to give you any advice."

"Mr Owen," and now she came close to him, but still ready to spring
back should it be necessary, "Mr Owen, I will tell you what I have
told no one else."

"Why me?"

"Because I trust you as I trust no one else."

"Then tell me."

"There is another will. There was another will rather, and he has
destroyed it."

"Why do you say that? You should not say that. You cannot know it."

"And, therefore, I say it only to you, as I would to my own heart.
The old man told me so--in his last moments. And then there is the
look of the ma