"The most important thing in my life," he added, then paused. "I thought for a while that I had better go away without saying anything to you, and more particularly since I have lost everything." He could hear, coming over the road, the regular hoof-beats of a trotting horse, and he had the feeling that it must be a messenger from the village, dispatched in search of Lettice with the news of her father's death. For a moment the horse seemed to be stopping; he was afraid that his opportunity had been lost; but, after all, the hoof-beats passed, diminished over the road. Then, "Since I have lost everything," he repeated. "Please tell me more," she demanded, "I don't understand--" "But," he continued, in the manner he had hastily adopted, "when the time came I couldn't; I couldn't go away and leave you. I thought, perhaps, you might be different from others; I thought, perhaps, you might like a man for what he was, and not for what he had. I would come to you, I decided, and tell you all this, tell you that I could work, yes, and would, and make enough--" He paused in order to observe the effect of his speech upon her. She was gazing clear-eyed at him, in a sort of shining expectancy, a grave, eager comprehension, appealing, incongruous, to her girlhood. "But why?" she queried. "Because I'm in love with you: I want to marry you." Her gaze did not falter, but her color changed swiftly, a rosy tide swept over her cheeks, and died away, leaving her pale. Her lips trembled. A palpable, radiant content settled upon her. "Thank you," she told him seriously; "it will make me very happy to marry you, Gordon." With a fleeting, backward glance he moved closer to her, his arm fell about her waist, he pressed a hasty, ill-directed kiss upon her chin. "Will you marry me now?" he asked eagerly. "You see, others wouldn't understand, you remember what your father said about the Makimmon breed? They would repeat that I had nothing, or even that I was marrying you for old Pompey's money. You know better than that, you know he wouldn't give us a penny." "It wouldn't matter now what any one said," she returned serenely. "But it would be so much easier--we could slip off quietly somewhere, and come back married, all the fuss avoided, all the say so's and say no's shut up right at the beginning." "When do you want to be--be married?" "Right away! now! to-day!" "Oh ... oh, Gordon, but we couldn't! I haven't even a white dress here. I might go into Greenstream, be ready to-morrow--" "No, no, no, I'm afraid it must be now or never; something would take you from me. I knew it, I was afraid of it, from the first ... I'll shoot myself."