‘If you’ll have _me_,’ she murmured in a tone of delight as she nestled against his rough clothes. ‘That’s settled, then, and the sooner the banns are up the better! Here, mother! Come along and hear the news. Lizzie has promised to marry me, and I shall take her to church as soon as we’ve been cried.’ ‘Well! I _am_ pleased,’ said Mrs Barnes. ‘You couldn’t have got a neater wife, Larry, though her eyesight’s terribly against her, poor thing! But I’m sure of one thing, Liz, if you can’t do all for him that another woman might, you’ll love my lad with the best among them, and that thought will make me lie quiet in my grave.’ The poor cannot afford the time to be as sentimental over such things as the rich. Larry kissed his cousin two or three times on the forehead in signification of the compact they had just entered into, and then he got up and shook himself, and prepared to go back to his afternoon work. ‘That’s a good job settled,’ he thought as he did so; ‘it will make Lizzie happy, and drive a deal of nonsense may be out of my head. But if ever I can pay out that scoundrel Darley I’ll do it, if it costs me the last drop of my blood.’ The blind girl regarded what had passed between her cousin and herself with very different feelings. Condemned, by reason of her infirmity, to pass much of her young life in solitude, the privation had repaid itself by giving her the time and opportunity for an amount of self-culture which, if subjected to the rough toil and rougher pleasures of her class, she never could have attained. Her ideas regarding the sanctity of love and marriage were very different from those of other Corston girls. She could never have ‘kept company,’ as they termed it, with one man this month and another the next. Her pure mind, which dwelt so much within itself, shrank from the levity and coarseness with which she had heard such subjects treated, and believing, as she had done, that she should never be married, she had pleased herself by building up an ideal of what a husband should be, and how his wife would love and reverence him. And this ideal had always had for its framework a fancied portrait of her cousin Laurence. In reality, this young fellow was an average specimen of a fresh-faced country youth, with plenty of colour and flesh and muscle. But to the blind girl’s fancy he was perfection. Her little hands from babyhood had traced each feature of his face until she knew every line by heart, and though she had never acknowledged it even to herself, she had been in love with him ever since she was capable of understanding the meaning of the term. So that although his proposal to marry her had come as a great surprise, it had also come as a great glory, and set her heart throbbing with the pleasant consciousness of returned affection.