He laughed quietly. "I suspect you know all about it," he said. "You are a quiet fellow, but I am not so blind as not to have found out that you are in love with Georgy. But in spite of that, I used to feel, although you are handsomer than I, and a thousand times cleverer, that I had the first claim upon her. You are younger than she is; she will be a grown woman while you are still a boy: in fact, there were plenty of reasons why I never hesitated to come before you. But now I feel bound in honor to tell you that I give her up--that--that you can--" He paused and looked at me, believing he had said enough, but I was stupefied by my ignorance, shyness and doubt. "Do you mean," I blurted out, "that you will give up marrying her--that I can have her in your place?" "That is precisely what I mean." "You will do nothing of the sort," I cried roughly. "Even if she cared for me--which she does not--nothing could induce me to marry anybody, and least of all Georgy Lenox." For she had wounded my pride and vanity to the quick, and even the kiss she had given me seemed a very Judas kiss of falsehood and betrayal. CHAPTER VIII. As soon as the warm weather came we went to the mountains, and when we returned in the autumn I had put aside one crutch, and felt at times that I was soon to banish the other. The boys had gone to college, and Belfield was desolate to me. Georgy was visiting cousins in New York. I had not seen her since that evening in June when she came to see me, nor was I to see her again for years. In November my mother and I went to Jamaica, for I had so outgrown my strength that fresh and alarming symptoms seemed to threaten me with more fatal ills than being merely crippled for life. But their only effect was to banish us for two years from all the familiar old scenes. We were never to go back to Belfield again and find our home there. Youth and passionate emotion and the thought of marriage had vanished now from my mother: she had, it sometimes seemed to me, no other wish than that I should be restored to health. I fancy she almost hated the memory of that brief time when the words of Mr. Floyd made her color deepen, her lip tremble and the glad impulsive tears start to her eyes. I accepted her willing service and her exclusive love. I needed both, God knows, in those days of weakness and pain. After a time I began to mend: then I grew robust and strong. My lameness diminished, and was comparatively cured, since I could dispense with crutch or stick. Whether youth or the fine air of those beautiful tropical uplands wrought the miracle, who shall say? Now, although I have the old limp, which I shall carry with me to the grave, my misfortune has ceased to be such to me: it is hard to feel that I was ever justified in regarding it as a calamity to becloud my life. And my little daughter said to me the other day, "I am so glad, papa, that you are lame, for I am sure to catch you up, even if the boys run away from me."