"No. You may remember once before on a very similar occasion I told you I should never again scold you, for the simple reason that I considered it language thrown away. I was right, as the sequel proved. Besides, the extreme becomingness of your toilet altogether disarmed me. By the bye, when do you return to town?" "Next week. And you?" "I shall go--when you go. May I call on you there?" "Indeed you may. I like you quite well enough," says her ladyship, with unsentimental and therefore most objectionable frankness, "to wish you for my friend." "Why should we not be more than friends, Cecil?" says Stafford, going up to her and taking both her hands in a warm, affectionate clasp. "Just consider how we two are situated: you are bound to me forever, until death shall kindly step in to relieve you of me, and I am bound to you as closely. Why, then, should we not accept our position, and make our lives one?" "You should have thought of all this before." "How could I? Think what a deception you practiced on me when sending that miserable picture. I confess I abhor ugliness. And then, your own conditions,--what could I do but abide by them?" "There are certain times when a woman does not altogether care about being taken so completely at her word." "But that was not one of them." Hastily. "I do not believe you would have wished to live with a man you neither knew nor cared for." "Perhaps not." Laughing. "Sometimes I hardly know myself what it is I do want. But are we not very well as we are? I dare say, had we been living together for the past three years, we should now dislike each other as cordially as--as do Maud Darley and her husband." "Impossible! Maud Darley is one person, you are quite another; while I--well"--with a smile--"I honestly confess I fancy myself rather more than poor Henry Darley." "He certainly _is_ plain," says Cecil, pensively, "and--he snores,--two great points against him, Yes, on consideration, you are an improvement on Henry Darley." Then, with a sudden change of tone, she says, "Does all this mean that you love me?" "Yes I confess it, Cecil," answers he, gravely, earnestly. "I love you as I never believed it possible I should love a woman. I am twenty-nine, and--think me cold if you will--but up to this I never yet saw the woman I wanted for my wife except you." "Then you ought to consider yourself the happiest man alive, because you have the thing you crave. As you reminded me just now, I am yours until death us do part." "Not all I crave, not the best part of you, your heart," replies he, tenderly. "No man loving as I do, could be contented with a part." "Oh, it is too absurd," says Cecil, with a little aggravating shake of the head. "In love with your own wife in this prosaic nineteenth century! It savors of the ridiculous. Such mistaken feeling has been tabooed long ago. Conquer it; conquer it."