"Nan! Nan! I would have you think it over, and over, and over again!" "But suppose I refused you after all?" "I would sooner that than be accepted in haste and--and repented of--you know!" It was as though he was maintaining his balance for a bet, and near the end of his endurance even so. Nan watched him with a smile touched by the last beams of the setting sun, but as she rose the red glory beat full upon her. "Very well!" said she. "Then if you won't come to me for your answer, I must bring it to you." Night falls like an assassin in that country, but the purple tints were only beginning when in his very ear she implored him not to leave her any more, and he held her closer, but said he must. It would not be for long. Others were growing rich in a day; he would make one more. He knew it; something told him; and again, something else told her. Yet she was vexed with herself for her impulsive appeal against a decision to which she had felt reconciled but the moment before; and vexed with him for scarcely listening to her appeal, unpremeditated as it was, unreasonable as it might be. He might have wavered; she would not have had him yield. His resolution was fine, heroic; she only wondered whether it was quite human, and wondering, lost the thread of his defense. "Think, think!" he urged. "Think what it would be for me to go home in this ship and marry you as I am, on my poor captain's certificate and nothing else; and then, only think, if I followed in a few months with a few thousand of my own behind me! You may say I ought to have thought of this before. But I did. I told your father so a few minutes before the wreck. I wanted you to wait for me--I was selfish enough for that from the beginning!" The disparaging epithet pricked Nan to interrupt him and take it on herself. But Denis persisted without a smile. "Darling, I am selfish about it still; for if I am not worth waiting for, I am not worth having; but if you can wait only a few months--not a day more than a year--I will come to you as I should come if it is to be--but come I will, rich or poor, if I am alive! Nan, darling, I have everything to gain, only these few months to lose; but I will gain all the world in them. I will, I will, I will!" She could not but be infected with his confidence, his enthusiasm, and his ideal. There in the dusk were the eager Irish eyes glistening and burning into hers, but there also was the strong north-country jaw set for success as the needle to the pole. And yet--and yet--she was weeping on his shoulder as the purple turned to deepest blue. "I could have helped you, dearest," came her broken whispers. "But no, not here. It's an awful country. It will break my heart to think of you in it. I thought, if you loved me ... after all we have been through ... you would never, never leave me again! But, dearest, I do believe in you, and I will wait, for you know best."