"Come and talk to Aunt Lydia again. How rude we are!" "I want to talk to _you_," he demurred. "Aren't you going to ask me to stay to supper?" The suggestion came from the widow almost at the same moment. "I think we had better have the lamp," she went on. "The days are drawing in fast, Mr. Heriot, aren't they? We shall soon have winter again. Do you like the long evenings, or the long afternoons best? Just about now I always say that I can't bear to think of having to begin lighting up at five or six o'clock--it seems so unnatural; and then, next summer, somehow I feel quite lost, not being able to let down the blinds and light the lamp for tea. Mamie, dear, shut the window, and let down the blinds before I light the lamp--somebody might see in!" She suggested the danger in the same tone in which she might have apprehended a burglary. Under a glass shade a laggard clock ticked drearily towards the crisis, and Heriot provoked its history by the eagerness with which he looked to see the time. It had been a wedding-present from "poor dear Edward's brother," and only one clockmaker had really understood it. The man had died, and since then---- He listened, praying for the kitchen to engulf her. When she withdrew at last, with an apology for leaving him, he rose, and went to the girl's side. "Do you know why I came this afternoon?" he said. She did know--had known it in the moment that he opened the window for her: "To say 'good-bye,'" she murmured. "I came to beg you not to go! Dearest, what do you relinquish by marrying me now? Not the stage--your hope of the stage is over; not your ambition in itself--you can be ambitious as my wife. You lose nothing, and you give--a heaven. Mamie, won't you stay?" She leant on the mantelpiece without speaking. In the pause, Mrs. Baines' voice reached them distinctly, as she said, "Put the brawn on a smaller dish." "You are forgetting. There was ... a reason besides the stage." "It is you who've forgotten. I told you I would be content.... It wouldn't be repugnant to you?" "To refuse while I thought I had a future, and to say 'yes,' now that----How can you ask me? It would be an insult to your love." "I do ask you," he urged; "I implore." "You implore me to be contemptible. You would have a disappointed woman for your wife. You deserve something better than that." "Oh, my God," said Heriot, in a low voice, "if I could only tell you how I ache to take you in my arms--as softly as if you were a child! If I could tell you what it is to me to know that you are passing out of my life and that in two days' time I shall never see you again!... Mamie?" The heavy shuffle of the servant was heard in the passage. "Mamie?" he repeated desperately. "It will be worse over there." Her eyes were big with perplexity and doubt. "Mamie?" "Are you sure you--sure----" "I love you; I want you. Only trust me!... Mamie?" "If you're quite sure you wish it," she faltered,--"yes!" CHAPTER VI