“But after all it is hardly worth the telling, because, you see, we are very comfortable now.  Poor Ascott, we suppose, must be in Australia.  I earn enough to keep Johanna and myself, and Miss Balquidder is a good friend to us.  We have repaid her, and owe nobody any thing.  Still, we have suffered a great deal.  Two years ago; oh! it was a dreadful time.”

She was hardly aware of it, but her candid tell-tale face betrayed more even than her words.  It cut Robert Lyon to the heart.

“You suffered, and I never knew it.”

“I never meant you to know.”

“Why not?” He walked the room in great excitement.  “I ought to have been told; it was cruel not to tell me.  Suppose you had sunk under it; suppose you had died, or been driven to do what many a woman does for the sake of mere bread and a home—­what your poor sister did—­married.  But I beg your pardon.”

For Hilary had started up with her face all aglow.

“No,” she cried; “no poverty would have sunk me as low as that.  I might have starved, but I should never have married.”

Robert Lyon looked at her, evidently uncomprehending, then said humbly, though rather formally,

“I beg your pardon once more.  I had no right to allude to any thing of the kind.”

Hilary replied not.  It seemed as if now, close together, they were further apart than when the Indian seas rolled between them.

Mr. Lyon’s brown cheek turned paler and paler; he pressed his lips hard together; they moved once or twice, but still he did not utter a word.  At last, with a sort of desperate courage, and in a tone that Hilary had never heard from him in her life before, he said: 

“Yes, I believe I have a right, the right that every man has when his whole happiness depends upon it, to ask you one question.  You know every thing concerning me; you always have known; I meant that you should—­I have taken the utmost care that you should.  There is not a bit of my life that has not been as open to you as if—­as if—.  But I know nothing whatever concerning you.”

“What do you wish to know?” she faltered.

“Seven years is a long time.  Are you free?  I mean, are you engaged to be married?”

“No.”

“Thank God!”

He dropped his head down between his hands and did not speak for a long time.

And then with difficulty—­for it was always hard to him to speak out—­he told her, at least he somehow made her understand, how he had loved her.  No light fancy of sentimental youth, captivated by every fresh face it sees, putting upon each one the coloring of his own imagination, and adorning not what is, but what itself creates; no sudden, selfish, sensuous passion, caring only to attain its object, irrespective of reason, right, or conscience; but the strong deep love of a just man, deliberately choosing one woman as the best woman out of all the world, and setting himself resolutely to win her.  Battling