"It restores my belief in love," she exclaimed, "and in mankind." And she seemed content just to brood upon that thought. But he was not; naturally he wished for some assurance from her; so he stepped in her path as she was crossing the room, and, taking her by the hands, said, smilingly: "Do you know how you can testify your appreciation in a way to make me perfectly happy?" She shook her head, and tried to draw her hands away. "By taking a walk, the least walk in the world, beyond that wooden gate." She shuddered and her hands fell from his. "You do not know what you ask," said she; then after a moment, "it was that I meant and not the scar, when I spoke of my misfortune. I cannot go outside the garden wall, and I was wrong to listen to your words for a moment, knowing what a barrier this fact raises up between us." "Hermione,--" he was very serious now, and she gathered up all her strength to meet the questions she knew were coming,--"why cannot you go beyond the garden gate? Cannot you tell me? Or do you hesitate because you are afraid I shall smile at your reasons for this determined seclusion?" "I am not afraid of your smiling, but I cannot give my reasons. That I consider them good must answer for us both." "Very well, then, we will let them answer. You need not take the walk I ask, but give me instead another pleasure--your promise to be my wife." "Your wife?" "Yes, Hermione." "With such a secret between us?" "It will not be a secret long." "Mr. Etheridge," she cried with emotion, "you do not know the woman you thus honor. If it had been Emma----" "It is you I love." "It would have been safe," she went on as if she had not heard him. "She is lovely, and amiable, and constant, and in her memory there is no dark scar as there is in mine, a scar deeper than this," she said, laying her finger on her cheek, "and fully as ineffaceable." "Some day you will take me into your confidence," he averred, "and then that scar will gradually disappear." "What confidence you have in me?" she cried. "What have you seen, what can you see in me to make you trust me so in face of my own words?" "I think it is the look in your eyes. There is purity there, Hermione, and a deep sadness which is too near like sorrow to be the result of an evil action." "What do you call evil?" she cried. Then suddenly, "I once did a great wrong--in a fit of temper--and I can never undo it, never, yet its consequences are lasting. Would you give your heart to a woman who could so forget herself, and who is capable of forgetting herself again if her passions are roused as they were then?" "Perhaps not," he acknowledged, "but my heart is already given and I do not know how to take it back."