"No," he said bitterly, "for it's really me that you doubt. I can't understand what you have seen in me that makes you believe anything could change me towards you," he added with a kind of humbleness that touched her. "I could have borne to think that I was not worthy of you." "Not worthy of me! I never dreamed of such a thing." "But to have you suspect me of such meanness--" "O Mr. Arbuton!" --"As you hinted yesterday, is a disgrace that I ought not to bear. I have thought of it all night; and I must have my answer now, whatever it is." She did not speak; for every word that she had uttered had only served to close escape behind her. She did not know what to do; she looked up at him for help. He said with an accent of meekness pathetic from him, "Why must you still doubt me?" "I don't," she scarcely more than breathed. "Then you are mine, now, without waiting, and forever," he cried; and caught her to him in a swift embrace. She only said, "Oh!" in a tone of gentle reproach, yet clung to him a helpless moment as for rescue from himself. She looked at him in blank pallor, striving to realize the tender violence in which his pulses wildly exulted; then a burning flush dyed her face, and tears came into her eyes. "O, I hope you'll never be sorry," she said; and then, "Do let us go," for she had no distinct desire save for movement, for escape from that place. Her heart had been surprised, she hardly knew how; but at his kiss a novel tenderness had leaped to life in it. She suffered him to put her hand upon his arm, and then she began to feel a strange pride in his being tall and handsome, and hers. But she kept thinking as they walked, "I hope he'll never he sorry," and she said it again, half in jest. He pressed her hand against his heart, and met her look with one of protest and reassurance, that presently melted into something sweeter yet. He said, "What beautiful eyes you have! I noticed the long lashes when I saw you on the Saguenay boat, and I couldn't get away from them." "O please, don't speak of that dreadful time!" cried Kitty. "No? Why not?" "O because! I think it was such a bold kind of accident my taking your arm by mistake; and the whole next day has always been a perfect horror to me." He looked at her in questioning amaze. "I think I was very pert with you all day,--and I don't think I'm pert naturally,--taking you up about the landscape, and twitting you about the Saguenay scenery and legends, you know. But I thought you were trying to put me down,--you are rather down-putting at times,--and I admired you, and I couldn't bear it." "Oh!" said Mr. Arbuton. He dimly recollected, as if it had been in some former state of existence, that there were things he had not approved in Kitty that day, but now he met her penitence with a smile and another pressure of the hand. "Well, then," he said, "if you don't like to recall that time, let's go back of it to the day I met you on Goat Island Bridge at Niagara."