“It is better not,” she said, almost pleadingly, for her strength was failing her.  She almost begged him to be merciful.

“But you believe that I love you, Winsome?” he persisted.

Low in her heart of hearts Winsome believed it.  Her ear drank in every word.  She was silent only because she was thirsty to hear more.  But Ralph feared that he had fatally offended her.

“Are you angry with me, Winsome?” he said, bending from his masculine height to look under the lilac sunbonnet.

Winsome shook her head.  “Not angry, Ralph, only sorry to the heart.”

She stopped and turned round to him.  She held out a hand, when Ralph took it in both of his.  There was in the touch a determination to keep the barriers slight but sure between them.  He felt it and understood.

“Listen, Ralph,” she said, looking at him with shining eyes, in which another man would have read the love, “I want you to understand.  There is a fate about those who love me.  My mother died long ago; my father I never knew; my grandfather and grandmother are—­what you know, because of me; Mr. Welsh, at the Manse, who used to love me and pet me when I was a little girl, now does not speak to me.  There is a dark cloud all about me!” said Winsome sadly, yet bravely and determinedly.

Yet she looked as bright and sunshiny as her own name, as if God had just finished creating her that minute, and had left the Sabbath silence of thanksgiving in her eyes.  Ralph Peden may be forgiven if he did not attend much to what she said.  As long as Winsome was in the world, he would love her just the same, whatever she said.

“What the cloud is I cannot tell,” she went on; “but my grandfather once said that it would break on whoever loved me—­ and—­and I do not want that one to be you.”

Ralph, who had kept her hand a willing prisoner, close and warm in his, would have come nearer to her.

He said:  “Winsome, dear” (the insidious wretch! he thought that, because she was crying, she would not notice the addition, but she did)—­“Winsome, dear, if there be a cloud, it is better that it should break over two than over one.”

“But not over you,” she said, with a soft accent, which should have been enough, for any one, but foolish Ralph was already fixed on his own next words: 

“If you have few to love you, let me be the one who will love you all the time and altogether.  I am not afraid; there will be two of us against the world, dear.”

Winsome faltered.  She had not been wooed after this manner before.  It was perilously sweet.  Little ticking pulses beat in her head.  A great yearning came to her to let herself drift up on a sea of love.  That love of giving up all, which is the precious privilege, the saving dowry or utter undoing of women, surged in upon her heart.

She drew away her hand, not quickly, but slowly and firmly, and as if she meant it.  “I have come to a decision—­I have made a vow,” she said.  She paused, and looked at Ralph a little defiantly, hoping that he would take the law into his own hands, and forbid the decision and disallow the vow.