“You know me, and therefore you know my contempt for verses, as a rule, Laetitia.  But not for yours to me.  Why should you call them foolish?  They expressed your feelings—­hold them sacred.  They are something religious to me, not mere poetry.  Perhaps the third verse is my favourite . . .”

“It will be more than I can bear!”

“You were in earnest when you wrote them?”

“I was very young, very enthusiastic, very silly.”

“You were and are my image of constancy!”

“It is an error, Sir Willoughby; I am far from being the same.”

“We are all older, I trust wiser.  I am, I will own; much wiser.  Wise at last!  I offer you my hand.”

She did not reply.  “I offer you my hand and name, Laetitia.”

No response.

“You think me bound in honour to another?”

She was mute.

“I am free.  Thank Heaven!  I am free to choose my mate—­the woman I have always loved!  Freely and unreservedly, as I ask you to give your hand, I offer mine.  You are the mistress of Patterne Hall; my wife.”

She had not a word.

“My dearest! do you not rightly understand?  The hand I am offering you is disengaged.  It is offered to the lady I respect above all others.  I have made the discovery that I cannot love without respecting; and as I will not marry without loving, it ensues that I am free—­I am yours.  At last?—­your lips move:  tell me the words.  Have always loved, I said.  You carry in your bosom the magnet of constancy, and I, in spite of apparent deviations, declare to you that I have never ceased to be sensible of the attraction.  And now there is not an impediment.  We two against the world! we are one.  Let me confess to an old foible—­perfectly youthful, and you will ascribe it to youth:  once I desired to absorb.  I mistrusted; that was the reason:  I perceive it.  You teach me the difference of an alliance with a lady of intellect.  The pride I have in you, Laetitia, definitely cures me of that insane passion—­call it an insatiable hunger.  I recognize it as a folly of youth.  I have, as it were, gone the tour, to come home to you—­at last?—­and live our manly life of comparative equals.  At last, then!  But remember that in the younger man you would have had a despot—­perhaps a jealous despot.  Young men, I assure you, are orientally inclined in their ideas of love.  Love gets a bad name from them.  We, my Laetitia, do not regard love as a selfishness.  If it is, it is the essence of life.  At least it is our selfishness rendered beautiful.  I talk to you like a man who has found a compatriot in a foreign land.  It seems to me that I have not opened my mouth for an age.  I certainly have not unlocked my heart.  Those who sing for joy are not unintelligible to me.  If I had not something in me worth saying I think I should sing.  In every sense you reconcile me to men and the world, Laetitia.  Why press you to speak?  I will be the speaker.  As surely as you know me, I know you:  and . . .”