"Ah! don't ask me, my beloved!" he warily exclaimed. "It is all gone! Oh, the heavenly wonder to hear you, Isabel Morris, you--give me loving names! You might have answered me so differently; but your voice, your eyes, work miracles of healing, and I am whole again." Isabel gave again the laugh whose blithe, final sigh was always its most winning note. Then, with tremendous gravity, she said, "You are very indiscreet, dear, to let me know my power." His face clouded an instant, as if the thought startled him with its truth and value. But when she added, with yet deeper seriousness of brow, "That's no way to tame a shrew, my love," he laughed aloud, and peace came again with Isabel's smile. Then--because a woman must always insist on seeing the wrong side of the goods--she murmured, "Tell me, Arthur, what disturbed you." "Words, Isabel, mere words of yours, which I see now were meant in purest play. You told Leonard"-- "Leonard! What did I tell Leonard, dear?" "You told him not to confess certain anxieties, even if they were justified." "Oh, Arthur!" "I see my folly, dearest. But Isabel, he ought not to have answered that the more they were justified, the more they should go unconfessed!" "Oh, Arthur! the merest, idlest prattle! What meaning could you"-- "None, Isabel, none! Only, my good angel, I so ill deserve you that with every breath I draw I have a desperate fright of losing you, and a hideous resentment against whoever could so much as think to rob me of you." "Why, dear heart, don't you know that couldn't be done?" "Oh, I know it, you being what you are, even though I am only what I am. But, Isabel, you know he loves you. No human soul is strong enough to blow out the flame of the love you kindle, Isabel Morris, as one would blow out his bedroom candle and go to sleep at the stroke of a clock." "Arthur, I believe Leonard--and I do not say it in his praise--I believe Leonard can do that!" "No, not so, not so! Leonard is strong, but the fire of a strong man's love, however smothered, burns on without mercy, my beautiful, and you cannot go in and out of that burning house as though it were not on fire." "And shall Leonard, then, not be our nearest and best friend, as we had planned?" "He shall, Isabel. Ah yes; not one smallest part of your sweet friendship will I take from him, nor of his from you. For, Isabel, though he were as weak as I"-- "As weak as _I_, you should say, dear. You are not weak, Arthur, are you?" "Weak as the bending grass, Isabel, under this load of love. But though he, I say, were as weak as I, you--ah, you!--are as wise as you are bewitching; and if I should speak to you from my most craven fear, I could find but one word of warning." "Oh, you dear, blind flatterer! And what word would that be?" "That you are most bewitching when you are wisest."