‘I’ll call Cytherea,’ said Owen.  ’It is a matter which she alone can settle.’  He did not speak warmly.  His pride could not endure the pity which Edward’s visit and errand tacitly implied.  Yet, in the other affair, his heart went with Edward; he was on the same beat for paying off old debts himself.

‘Cythie, Mr. Springrove is here,’ he said, at the foot of the staircase.

His sister descended the creaking old steps with a faltering tread, and stood in the firelight from the hearth.  She extended her hand to Springrove, welcoming him by a mere motion of the lip, her eyes averted—­a habit which had engendered itself in her since the beginning of her illness and defamation.  Owen opened the door and went out—­leaving the lovers alone.  It was the first time they had met since the memorable night at Southampton.

‘I will get a light,’ she said, with a little embarrassment.

‘No—­don’t, please, Cytherea,’ said Edward softly, ’Come and sit down with me.’

‘O yes.  I ought to have asked you to,’ she returned timidly.  ’Everybody sits in the chimney-corner in this parish.  You sit on that side.  I’ll sit here.’

Two recesses—­one on the right, one on the left hand—­were cut in the inside of the fireplace, and here they sat down facing each other, on benches fitted to the recesses, the fire glowing on the hearth between their feet.  Its ruddy light shone on the underslopes of their faces, and spread out over the floor of the room with the low horizontality of the setting sun, giving to every grain of sand and tumour in the paving a long shadow towards the door.

Edward looked at his pale love through the thin azure twines of smoke that went up like ringlets between them, and invested her, as seen through its medium, with the shadowy appearance of a phantom.  Nothing is so potent for coaxing back the lost eyes of a woman as a discreet silence in the man who has so lost them—­and thus the patient Edward coaxed hers.  After lingering on the hearth for half a minute, waiting in vain for another word from him, they were lifted into his face.

He was ready primed to receive them.  ‘Cytherea, will you marry me?’ he said.

He could not wait in his original position till the answer came.  Stepping across the front of the fire to her own side of the chimney corner, he reclined at her feet, and searched for her hand.  She continued in silence awhile.

‘Edward, I can never be anybody’s wife,’ she then said sadly, and with firmness.

‘Think of it in every light,’ he pleaded; ’the light of love, first.  Then, when you have done that, see how wise a step it would be.  I can only offer you poverty as yet, but I want—­I do so long to secure you from the intrusion of that unpleasant past, which will often and always be thrust before you as long as you live the shrinking solitary life you do now—­a life which purity chooses, it may be; but to the outside world it appears like the enforced loneliness of neglect and scorn—­and tongues are busy inventing a reason for it which does not exist.’