‘Two months ago I had the temerity to ask you a certain question. I, who had come to judge you, if needs were to condemn, had ended by losing my heart to the only woman I had ever met who had power to drag it out of my own safe keeping. You rejected my suit. I left you. Time went on, but I found it impossible to forget you. At length I determined again to put my fortune to the proof. It was a forlorn hope, but I am an old soldier, and I would not despair. Once more I told you all that I had told you before; once more I put the same question to you. This time you did not say No, but neither did you say Yes. To-day I have come for your answer.’ He drew his chair a little closer and took one of her hands. ‘Mora, do not say that your answer to-day will be the same as it was before—do not say that you can never learn to care for me.’ She had listened with bent head and downcast eyes. She now disengaged her hand, rose, crossed to the window, and then came back. She was evidently much perturbed. ‘What shall I say? what shall I say?’ she asked half aloud. The colonel overheard her and started to his feet. ‘Let me tell you what to say!’ he exclaimed. She held up her hand. ‘One moment,’ she said. Then she motioned to him to be seated, and herself sat down again. ‘Has it never occurred to you,’ she began, ‘to ask yourself how much or how little you really know about the woman whom you are so desirous of making your wife? Three months ago you had not even learnt my name, and now—even now, how much more do you know respecting me and my antecedents than you knew the first day you met me?’ ‘I know that I love you. I ask to know nothing more.’ ‘You would take me upon trust?’ ‘Try me.’ She shook her head a little sadly. ‘It is not the way of the world.’ ‘This is a matter with which the world has nothing to do.’ ‘Colonel Woodruffe—I have a Past.’ ‘So have all of us who are no longer boys or girls.’ ‘It is only right that you should know the history of that Past.’ ‘Such knowledge could in nowise influence me. It is with the present and the future only that I have to do.’ ‘It is of the future that I am now thinking.’ ‘Pardon me if I scarcely follow you.’ ‘How shall I express to you what I wish to convey?’ She rose, crossed to the table, and taking up a book, began to turn its leaves carelessly over, evidently scarcely knowing what she was about. ‘If—if it so happened that I were to accede to your wishes,’ she said—‘if, in short, I were to become your wife—and at some future time, by some strange chance, some incident or fact connected with my past life, of which you knew nothing, and of which you had no previous suspicion, were to come to your knowledge, would you not have a right to complain that I had deceived you? that I had kept silence when I ought to have spoken? that—that’—— ‘Mora—Mora, if this is all that stands between me and your love—between me and happiness, it is nothing—less than nothing! I vow to you’——