That evening, Grove could do no less than call to inquire after Master Jim, who, not much the worse for his attack, kept his adoring mother in durance at his bedside, while Grove sat watching the opal flushes die out of a western sky, in company with Gladys. Quite another Gladys was this, in all save beauty and her dulcet voice, from his enslaver of town life. And now, to Mrs. Gervase's ill-concealed dismay, visits, meetings, rides, boating, began and continued daily. Grove was teaching Miss Eliot chess, he said, and the other things were what they call upon the stage "incidental divertisements." A fortnight of glorious weather had passed thus, when, on the eve of Grove's return to town and work, he asked Gladys to go out in a boat with him to watch the sunset on the water. "Now you have told me there is no reason I may not speak, I can wait no longer for an answer," he said, as, resting on his oars, he scanned her face eagerly. "When a man tears his heart out and throws it at a woman's feet, surely he offers something. But that, you know, is my all. If you can consent to share the kind of life mine has got to be for the next five or six years, I think I see daylight beyond. By that time, your first youth will be gone, you will be forgotten by the people who court you now, you will be a nobody in their esteem. To me, you will always be the one woman of the world. You will have the full love of my heart; and you shall see what that means, when a true man pours it upon you unrestrained. I don't pretend to be worth it, Heaven knows. But I do say you have never before been loved by a man like me, and you know it and feel it thoroughly. It's for you to take or leave me, accepting consequences." "What a stand-and-deliver kind of love-making," Gladys tried to say; but she was deeply stirred. Remaining silent, her eyes filled with tears; her head drooped towards her breast. "Gladys!" cried he, exultingly. "Don't you see, now, the real reason why I could not go abroad?" she said, smiling on him brightly, and lifting, at the same moment, her ungloved left hand to put back a loose lock of hair that the wind had blown across her cheek. Grove, gazing at her with his whole soul in his eyes, became aware of a ring upon the fourth finger,--a ring of such conspicuous brilliancy and choice gems as to convey but one meaning,--and his expression changed. "Oh! I hate it! I shall give it back!" she exclaimed, a burning blush settling upon her face. "I did not mean--it was an accident. I hate it, I tell you! Why do you look at me like that?" She tore the ring from her hand, and impetuously put it out of sight. Presently, as Grove, in mechanical fashion, resumed his rowing without a word, she cried out, passionately: