She nodded.  She put up one hand and lifted the thin black veil she was wearing, and turned her face upward to the stars.  They were very bright, that February night, down in South Carolina.

“But now,” he went on, after a moment, “it is all plain before us.  Charlotte, am I a strangely presumptuous lover to take so much for granted?  I don’t even ask if you have changed.  Knowing you, that doesn’t seem possible to me.  I have never wooed you, I have simply—­recognized you!  You belonged to me.  I was sure that you so recognized me.  It has been as I dreamed it would be, when I was a boy, dreaming my first dreams about such things.  I have known many women—­have had a few of them for my very good friends.  I never cared to play at love with any one; it didn’t interest me.  But when I saw you I loved you.  I won’t say ‘fell in love;’ that’s not the phrase.  I loved you.  The love has grown with every day I have known you—­grown even when I thought it was to be denied.”

“I know,” Charlotte said again, and now she was smiling through tears at the friendly stars above her.

“Yes, you know,” he answered, happily.  “That’s the wonderful thing to me—­that you should know.”

A little path wound through the park, as deserted as the street.  He led her into this, and, pausing where a group of high-grown shrubs screened them from all possible passers-by, he spoke with all the passion he had hitherto restrained.

“Charlotte, are you my wife?  Tell me so—­in this!”

He laid one arm about her shoulders, his hand lifted her face as he stooped to meet it with his own.  When he raised his head again it was to look, as she had looked, toward the stars.

“That was worth,” he said tensely, “all the pain I have ever known.”  Then as he led her on he spoke again with an odd wistfulness.

“Dearest, I have talked about our love not needing words, and yet, I find I want to hear your voice after all.  Will you tell me, in words, how it is with you?  I want to hear!”

After a moment she answered him, softly, yet with a vibrant sweetness in her tone.  “John Leaver, it is as you say.  I have known, from the first, that I—­must love you.  You made me, in spite of myself.  I couldn’t—­couldn’t help it!”

He bent his head, with a low murmur of happiness.  Then:  “And I thought I could do without words!” he said.

For the first time in many days Charlotte’s lips curved suddenly into the little provoking, arch smile which was one of her greatest charms.

“I never thought I could!” she said.

He laughed.  “You shall not!  And now I’m going to speak some very definite words to which I want a very definite answer.  Charlotte, you are—­I can’t bear to remind you—­as far as kinspeople go, quite alone in the world.  There is no reason why that should be true.  The nearest of all relations can be yours to-morrow.  Will you marry me to-morrow, before we go North?  Then we shall be quite free to stop in Baltimore or to go on as you prefer.  I can go with you, at once, to close up the little house, if you wish.  Is there any reason why we should stay apart a day longer?”