"I know, too, that I can comfort you. I know I can make you happy, beyond your highest dreams. I know I can take you away from every association of sadness, far off to beautiful foreign countries where no one will know us for anything but what we are--what alone we shall be henceforth, a man and woman who love each other and who have been united in the holy bond of marriage, which God has blessed--just a husband and wife, Christine--get used to the dear names and thought--with whose right to love each other no one will have anything to do. If the idea of the past disturbs you we will get rid of it by going where we have no past, where no one will ever have heard of us before. As for ourselves, Christine, I can give you my honor that there is nothing in the past of either of us that disturbs me for one pulse-beat, and I'll engage to make you forget all that it pains you to remember. Why, it is a simple thing to do. We send for a clergyman, and here in this room, with Mrs. Murray and Eliza and Harriet for witnesses, we are married to-morrow morning! In the afternoon we sail for Europe, to begin our long life of happiness together. You know whether I could make you happy or not, Christine. You know whether your heart longs to go with me--just as surely as I know that my one possible chance of happiness is in getting your consent to be my wife." "I cannot!" she said, "I cannot! We must think of others beside ourselves. If you are willing to sacrifice yourself, think of your mother and sisters!" "Sacrifice myself! I sacrifice myself only if I give you up. You must feel the falseness of such a use of the word. As for my mother and sisters, I ask you to test that matter. Agree to marry me and I promise that they will come to our wedding, and my mother will call you daughter, and my sisters will call you sister, and they will open their hearts to you and love you." "Because your will is all-powerful with them," she said. "Yes, partly because they trust and believe in me, and will sanction what I do; and also because--in spite of a good deal of surface conventionality and worldliness--they are right-minded, true-hearted, good women, who will only need to know your whole history, as I know it, and to realize my love for you, as I can make them realize it, to feel that our marriage is the right and true and only issue of it all."