"Why should I marry you if I don't love you?" she went on. "Why, of course because you are Mr Vanbrunt, the greatest millionaire in England. Your choice has fallen on me. Let me accept with gratitude my brilliant fate, and if I don't actually dislike you, so much the better for both of us." Stephen continued to look hard at her, but he said nothing. Her beauty astonished him. "And what do we both lose," said Anne, "in such a marriage--you as well as I? Is it not the _one_ chance, the one hope of a mutual love? Is it so small a thing in your eyes that you can cast the possibility from you of a love that will meet yours and not endure it, the possibility of a woman somewhere, who might be found for diligent seeking, who might walk into your life without seeking, who would love you as much as"--Anne's voice shook--"perhaps even more than you love her;--to whom you--you yourself--stern and grim as you seem to many--might be the whole world? Have you always been so busy making this dreadful money, which buys so much, that you have forgotten the things that money can't buy? No; no. Do not let us lock each other out from the only thing worth having in this hard world. We should be companions in misfortune." She held out her hands to him with a sudden beautiful gesture, and smiled at him through her tears. He took her hands in his large grasp, and in his small quick eyes there were tears too. "We have both something to forgive each other," she said, trembling like a reed. "I have spoken harshly, and you unwisely. But the day will come when you will be grateful to me that I did not shut you out from the only love that could make you, of all men, really happy--the love that is returned." He kissed each hand gently, and released them. He could not speak. She went swiftly from him through the trees. "May God bless her," said Stephen. "May God in heaven bless her." CHAPTER X "Thine were the weak, slight hands That might have taken this strong soul, and bent Its stubborn substance to thy soft intent." --WILLIAM WATSON. It was hard on Stephen that when he walked into a certain drawing-room the following evening he should find Anne there. It was doubly hard that he should have to take her in to dinner. Yet so it was. There ought to have been a decent interval before their next meeting. Some one had arranged tactlessly, without any sense of proportion. Though he had not slept since she left him in the garden, still it seemed only a moment ago, and that she was back beside him in an instant, without giving him time to draw breath.