He was walking up and down the room, with his face averted, and with pain and anger and humiliation in his heart. All this time he had believed he was leading Rose towards the reasonable love for him which was all he hoped for. He had supposed himself in almost a lofty position, offering to this young, fresh, simple creature more in every way than she could ever have had but for him--a higher position, a love more noble than any foolish boy-and-girl attachment. To find out in a moment how very different the real state of the case had been, and to have conjured up before him the picture of a martyr-girl, weeping and struggling, and a mother “with a host of petty maxims preaching down her daughter’s heart,” was intolerable to him. He had never been so mortified, so humbled in all his life. He walked up and down the room in a ferment, with that sense of the unbearable which is so bitter. Unbearable!--yet to be borne somehow; a something not to be ignored or cast off. It said much for Rose’s concluding appeal that he heard it at all, and took in the meaning of it in his agitation and hot, indignant rage; but he did hear it, and it touched him. “If you say I am to marry you, I will do it.” He stopped short in his impatient walk. Should he say it--in mingled despite and love--and keep her to her word? He came up to her and took her clasped hands within his, half in anger, half in tenderness, and looked her in the face. “If I say you are to marry me, you will do it? You pledge yourself to that? You will marry me if I please?” “Yes,” said Rose, very pale, looking up at him steadfastly. She neither trembled nor hesitated. She had gone beyond any superficial emotion. Then he stooped and kissed her with a passion which was rough--almost brutal. Rose’s pale face flushed, and her slight figure wavered like a reed; but she neither shrank nor complained. He had a right to dictate to her--she had put it into his hands. The look of those large, innocent eyes, from which all conflict had departed, which had grown abstract in their wistfulness, holding fast at least by one clear duty, went to his heart. He kept looking at her, but she did not quail. She had no thought but her word, and to do what she had said.