“Does whatever in the shape of an engagement once existed between you still hold good? or have you put an end to it?” The something of hurry and apprehension that she detects in his voice, and in which she recognizes his last bid for possible happiness, affects her so strongly that she can only give a nod, which is apparently of so doubtful an interpretation that he misunderstands it. “Do not be afraid to tell me if you have,” he goes on with what she knows to be an unusual effort at self-control and temper. “I shall be the last person to blame you. I never could quite understand what you----” “We belong to each other still: we always shall,” she interrupts, in a low firm voice, hastening to stop the mouth that is about to utter a too familiar formula. A sort of relief spreads over the lined face beside her; yet there is a cavilling discontent in his repetition of her phrase. “_Belong_ to each other! Well, you have done that, I suppose, according to your ideas, since you were both in long clothes.” She pauses, and a cloud seems to pass before her clear strong eyes; pauses with the feeling--an unaccountably heavy one--of being about to do something absolutely irrevocable, then speaks. “Do you wish us to marry soon?” He shoots a look at her to make sure that she is in earnest. “I wish for a grandson!” he answers crudely. Again she pauses, chiding herself as squeamish for a return of that sensation of repulsion which had assailed her when first the practical aspect of her relation to Rupert had been suggested to her by Mrs. Darcy. She has not conquered it when her uncle repeats and enlarges his phrase. “I wish before I die to see a grandson growing up, with as much of you and as little of Rupert in him as you can make him!” She listens with a half-shivering docility. Is it the strangeness, the something of coarse and homely in the wording of her uncle’s wish, that gives her this prudish and unreasonable sense of disrelish? “No doubt you are laughing at the idea of wanting an heir when there is so preciously little left to be heir to,” continues Sir George, in a key half angry at her delay in acquiescence, half appealing to her mercy. “But when you have got one spot of earth into your very bones, you do not like the idea of being quite wiped off from it.”