‘When I told you to-day that I loved you,’ he said, ‘I ought to have told you that I am very poor.’ ‘I know it,’ she said. ‘But I am poorer even than you know. I am not in Mr. Quinn’s employment any more. I have no settled income, and only a prospect of earning a very small one.’ He paused. ‘I shall have to go away from Ballymoy. I must live in Dublin. I do not think it is fair to ask you to marry me. I shall have no more to live upon than----’ She moved a step nearer to him and laid her hand on his arm. ‘Look at me,’ she said. He raised his eyes to her face, and saw again there, as he had seen in church, the wonderful shining of love, which is stronger than all things and holds poverty and hardship cheap. ‘Keep looking at me still,’ she said. ‘Now tell me: Do you really think it matters that you are poor? Do you think I care whether you have much or little? Tell me.’ He could not answer her, although he knew that there was only one answer to her question. ‘Do you think that I love money? Do you doubt that I love you?’ Her voice sunk almost to a whisper as she spoke, and her eyes fell from looking into his. Just as when he kissed her in the church, she flushed suddenly, but this time she did not try to escape from him. Instead she clung to his arm, and hid her face against his shoulder. He put his arms round her and held her close. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I was a fool to come here thinking that my being poor would matter. I might have known. Indeed, I think I did know even before I spoke to you.’ She had no answer except a long soft laugh, which was half smothered in his arms. CHAPTER XX On Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons Canon Beecher enjoyed the privilege of a fire in his study. He was supposed to be engaged at these seasons in the preparation of his sermons, a serious and exacting work which demanded solitude and profound quiet. In earlier years he really had prepared his sermons painfully, but long practice brings to the preacher a certain fatal facility. Old ideas are not improved by being clothed in new phrases, and of new ideas--a new idea will occasionally obtrude itself even on the Christian preacher--the Canon was exceedingly mistrustful. The study was an unexciting and comparatively comfortable room. The firelight on winter afternoons played pleasantly on the dim gold backs of the works of St. Augustine, a fine folio edition bequeathed to Mrs. Beecher by a scholarly uncle, which reposed undisturbed along a lower shelf. Adventurous rays occasionally explored a faded print of the Good Shepherd which hung above the books, and gleamed upon the handle of the safe where the parish registers and church plate were stored. The quiet and the process of digesting his mid-day dinner frequently tempted the Canon to indulge in a series of pleasant naps on Sunday afternoons.