“Yes.”

“Did you mean it?

“Did I mean what?”

“When you said you’d marry me.”  His voice trembled a little.  “I’ve been thinking of nothing but you all day.  You’re not—­sorry?  You haven’t changed your mind?”

She shook her head.

“At dinner when you wouldn’t look at me, and this afternoon—­”

“No, I’m not sorry,” she said, cutting him short.  “I’m not sorry.”

He put his arm about her with an air that was almost apologetic.  And, seeing that she did not resist, he drew her to him and kissed her.  Suddenly, unaccountably to her, she clung to him.

“You love me!” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” she whispered, “but I am tired.  I—­I am going upstairs, Howard.  I am tired.”

He kissed her again.

“I can’t believe it!” he said.  “I’ll make you a queen.  And we’ll be married in the autumn, Honora.”  He nodded boyishly towards the open windows of the library.  “Shall I tell them?” he asked.  “I feel like shouting it.  I can’t hold on much longer.  I wonder what the old lady will say!”

Honora disengaged herself from his arms and fled to the screen door.  As she opened it, she turned and smiled back at him.

“Mrs. Holt knows already,” she said.

And catching her skirt, she flew quickly up the stairs.

BOOK II

Volume 3.

CHAPTER I

So long as ye both shall live!

It was late November.  And as Honora sat at the window of the drawing-room of the sleeping car, life seemed as fantastic and unreal as the moss-hung Southern forest into which she stared.  She was happy, as a child is happy who is taken on an excursion into the unknown.  The monotony of existence was at last broken, and riven the circumscribing walls.  Limitless possibilities lay ahead.

The emancipation had not been without its pangs of sorrow, and there were moments of retrospection—­as now.  She saw herself on Uncle Tom’s arm, walking up the aisle of the old church.  How many Sundays of her life had she sat watching a shaft of sunlight strike across the stone pillars of its gothic arches!  She saw, in the chancel, tall and grave and pale, Peter Erwin standing beside the man with the flushed face who was to be her husband.  She heard again the familiar voice of Dr. Ewing reciting the words of that wonderful introduction.  At other weddings she had been moved.  Why was her own so unrealizable?

“Honora, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy state of Matrimony?  Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

She had promised.  And they were walking out of the church, facing the great rose window with its blended colours, and the vaults above were ringing now with the volume of an immortal march.