Max, I trembled. For he looked at her as he used to look when they were young. And it seems so hard to believe that love ever can die out. I thought, what if this exceeding calmness of my sister's should be only the cloak which pride puts on to hide intolerable pain?--But I was mistaken. And now I marvel, not that he, but that I--who know my sister as a sister ought--could for an instant have seen in those soft sad eyes anything beyond what her words expressed the more plainly, as they were such extremely kind and gentle words. Francis came closer, and said something in a low voice, of which I caught only the last sentence,-- "Penelope, will you trust me again?" I would have slipped away--but my sister detained me; tightly her fingers closed on mine; but she answered Francis composedly: "I do not quite comprehend you." "Will you forgive and forget? will you marry me?" "Francis!" I exclaimed, indignantly; but Penelope put her hand upon my mouth. "That is right. Don't listen to Dora--she always hated me. Listen to me. Penelope, you shall make me anything you choose; you would be the saving of me--that is, if you could put up with such a broken, sickly, ill-tempered wretch." "Poor Francis!" and she just touched him with her hand. He caught it and kept it. Then Penelope seemed to wake up as out of a dream. "You must not," she said hurriedly; "you must not hold my hand." "Why not?" "Because I, do not love you any more." It was so; he could not doubt it. The vainest man alive must, I think, have discerned at once that my sister spoke out of neither caprice or revenge, but in simple sadness of truth. Francis must have felt almost by instinct that, whether broken or not, the heart so long his, was his no longer--the love was gone. Whether the mere knowledge of this made his own revive, or whether finding himself in the old familiar places--this walk was a favourite walk of theirs--the whole feeling returned in a measure, I cannot tell; I do not like to judge. But I am certain that, for the time, Francis suffered acutely. "Do you hate me then?" said he at length. "No; on the contrary, I feel very kindly towards you. There is nothing in the world I would not do for you." "Except marry me?" "Even so." "Well, well; perhaps you are right. I, a poor clerk, with neither health, nor income, nor prospects--" He stopped, and no wonder, before the rebuke of my sister's eyes. "Francis, you know you are not speaking as you think. You know I have given you my true reason, and my only one. If we were engaged still, in outward form, I should say exactly the same, for a broken promise is less wicked than a deceitful vow. One should not marry--one ought not--when one has ceased to love." Francis made her no reply. The sense of all he had lost, now that he had lost it, seemed to come upon him heavily, overwhelmingly. His first words were the saddest and humblest I ever heard from Francis Charteris.