"Can you not take her with you?" enquired the old woman, in a low tone. "Listen what I have devised for you. You love her. I know you love her, and she loves you. Take her with you; marry her under my lady's eye, and with her sanction; keep perfectly quiet, whatever takes place in England; and, when all is still again, demand to return and resume your rights, and I will so work here, while you are gone, that that dear child shall have her rights too, in spite of all the cunning of the cunningest man within the four seas." "But how can it be managed?" asked Smeaton. "And will she go upon so sudden and unexpected a proposal?" "Have you said nothing to her?" returned the housekeeper, with a look of surprise. "Have you not told her all your heart? I thought--I fancied--I felt sure, on that day that you were so long alone together, that you must have spoken all that need be said. Why, besides the ride in the morning, you were walking up and down the terrace in the evening for more than two hours, with Dick sitting, whistling, upon a stone at a distance." "She knows that I love her," replied Smeaton; "and I trust that she loves me; but it is a very different thing to promise me her hand at some future period, and to agree to fly with me to a foreign land at a very short notice. The motives, the objects, her own state and condition here, the very necessity of her going, even if she did not go to be my wife, must all be explained to her, and I have no opportunity of explaining. I see her not for a single instant during the day without witnesses; and, though I pass up and down the stairs more frequently, perhaps, than is prudent, for the purpose of catching one stray passing word, I have never met her."