“I have already told you that, if everything is settled and your mind made up, it would be foolish to go on at all. If there is any hope I will speak. Arthur,” said Durant suddenly, “you are very fastidious--very difficult to please in ordinary cases. Do you think you will be able to live with the good people we have seen to-night?” “Why should I live with them? they have nothing to do with it. A wife comes with her husband. _They_, whatever they may be, are quite outside the question. She is to be thought of, and she alone.” “Have you ever reflected, Arthur, that if _she_--the lady--is as noble a character as you think, she will not give up her own people for you or anyone? I should not care to have a woman do that for me. I think she would have good reason to judge me severely after, if I failed in threefold duty to her. You should be father and mother in such a case--and husband too.” “And so I mean to be, so I am! What are father and mother to me now? I have formed a tie which is beyond all these mechanical, understood ties, in which there is no choice on the child’s part; and she will feel as I do.” “Women don’t always do that,” said Durant; “and I, for one, don’t like them when they do. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that she did not, what should you do then? It is worth taking into consideration.” “She would be sure to do what was best; and if that is all, we can easily baffle your cross-examination, Durant. You are not good at bullying witnesses,” said Arthur, his heart rising in spite of him. “Ask me something more difficult than this.” “You would have to live,” said the other. “I don’t think that is more difficult, but you may not be of my opinion. How are you to live? upon your allowance, which has never been too much for you alone?” “Two spend no more than one,” said the catechumen, recovering his spirits; “and she is not a spendthrift like me. She has been trained to make a little go a great way. She will reduce my expenses instead of increasing them.” “Yet two eat more than one, to put it on the simplest ground.” “Eat! that is like you, Durant. How little you know about it! Is it on eating one spends one’s money? So far as that goes, you may say what you please. There is nothing in _you_, old fellow, to frighten anyone. Come, I forgive your objections to my happiness when I see how little you have got to say.” “You are sure then, entirely sure, that it is your happiness, Arthur?” Durant rose, and put his hands on his friend’s shoulders, looking down upon him with a face full of emotion. “You have been the nearest a brother of anything I ever knew--brother, or sister, or both together. Are you sure, boy, are you sure? Happiness is a sacred thing. I would not touch it, I would not harm it. Are you sure?” “As sure as that I love her, Durant.”