"I think that there is a great deal," reply I, speaking very steadily, and so saying, I stretch out my hand and of my own accord put it in his again. He cannot well return it to me, so he keeps it. "And yet it is impossible?" he says, with hesitating interrogation, while his steel-blue eyes look anxiously into mine. "Is it?" say I, a wily smile beginning to creep over my features. "If it is, what was the use of asking me?" I have the grace to grow extremely red as I make this observation. "Nancy!" seizing my other hand, too, and speaking in a hurried, low voice that slightly shakes with the force of his emotion, "what are you saying? You do not know what you are implying." "Yes I do," reply I, firmly. "I know perfectly. And it is _not_ impossible. Not at all, I should say." Upon this explicit declaration an ordinary lover would have had me in his arms and smothered me with kisses before you could look round, but my lover is abnormal. He does nothing of the kind. "Are you sure," he says, with an earnest gravity and imploring emphasis, "that you understand what you are doing? Are you certain, Nancy, that if we had not been friends, if you had not been loath to pain me, that you would not have answered differently? Think, child! think well of it! this is not a matter of months or even years, but of your whole long young life." "Yes," say I, gravely, looking down. "I know it is." And put thus solemnly before me, the idea of the marriage state seems to me, hardly less weightily oppressive than the idea of eternity. "How should I feel," he continues (he has put a hand on each of my shoulders, and is looking at me with a serious yet tender fixity), "if, by-and-by, in the years ahead of us, you came and told me that by my selfishness, taking advantage of your youth, I had destroyed your life?" "And do you think," say I, with a flash of indignation, "that even if you had done it, I should come and tell you?" "Are you _quite_ sure that among all the men of your acquaintance, men nearer you in age, more akin in tastes, men _not_ gray-haired, _not_ weather-beaten, _not_ past their best years--there is not one with whom you would more willingly spend your life than with me? If it is so, I _beseech_ you to tell me, as you would tell your mother!" "If there were," reply I, smiling broadly, a smile which greatly widens my mouth, and would show my dimples if I had any, "I should _indeed_ be susceptible! The two curates that you saw the other night--the one who tore his gloves into strips, you know, and the other who ate so much--Toothless Jack--these are the sort of men among whom my lines have lain. Do you think I am likely to be very much in love with any of _them_?" My speech does not seem so altogether reassuring as I had expected.