“Don’t you think we should be going back?” she said.

Rut he seemed not to hear her.

“May I ask you something?” he said.

“That depends,” she answered.

“Are you going to marry Mr. Rangely?”

“No,” she said, and turned away.  “Why did you think that?”

He quivered.

“Victoria!”

She looked up at him, swiftly, half revealed, her eyes like stars surprised by the flush of dawn in her cheeks.  Hope quickened at the vision of hope, the seats of judgment themselves were filled with radiance, and rumour, cowered and fled like the spirit of night.  He could only gaze, enraptured.

“Yes?” she answered.

His voice was firm but low, yet vibrant with sincerity, with the vast store of feeling, of compelling magnetism that was in the man and moved in spite of themselves those who knew him.  His words Victoria remembered afterwards—­all of them; but it was to the call of the voice she responded.  His was the fibre which grows stronger in times of crisis.  Sure of himself, proud of the love which he declared, he spoke as a man who has earned that for which he prays,—­simply and with dignity.

“I love you,” he said; “I have known it since I have known you, but you must see why I could not tell you so.  It was very hard, for there were times when I led myself to believe that you might come to love me.  There were times when I should have gone away if I hadn’t made a promise to stay in Ripton.  I ask you to marry me, because I—­know that I shall love you as long as I live.  I can give you this, at least, and I can promise to protect and cherish you.  I cannot give you that to which you have been accustomed all your life, that which you have here at Fairview, but I shouldn’t say this to you if I believed that you cared for them above —­other things.”

“Oh, Austen!” she cried, “I do not—­I—­do not!  They would be hateful to me—­without you.  I would rather live with you—­at Jabe Jenney’s,” and her voice caught in an exquisite note between laughter and tears.  “I love you, do you understand, you!  Oh, how could you ever have doubted it?  How could you?  What you believe, I believe.  And, Austen, I have been so unhappy for three days.”

He never knew whether, as the most precious of graces ever conferred upon man, with a womanly gesture she had raised her arms and laid her hands upon his shoulders before he drew her to him and kissed her face, that vied in colour with the coming glow in the western sky.  Above the prying eyes of men, above the world itself, he held her, striving to realize some little of the vast joy of this possession, and failing.  And at last she drew away from him, gently, that she might look searchingly into his face again, and shook her head slowly.

“And you were going away,” she said, “without a word I thought—­you didn’t care.  How could I have known that you were just—­stupid?”

His eyes lighted with humour and tenderness.