"Then you _will_ marry me, Phyllis?" cries he, with renewed hope. "If you _like_ me as you say, I will make you love me when you are once my own. No man could love as I do without creating some answering affection. Phyllis," he goes on, passionately, "look at me and say you believe all this. Oh, my life, my darling, how I have longed for you! How I have watched the hours that would bring me to your side! How I have hated the evenings that parted you from me! Say one little kind word to me to make me happy." His tone is so full of hope and joy that almost I feel myself drifting with the current of his passion. But Dora's face rising before me checks the coming words. I draw back. "Phyllis, put me out of pain," he says, entreatingly. I begin to find the situation trying, being a mere novice in the art of receiving and refusing proposals with propriety. "I--I don't think I want to get married yet," I say, at length, with nervous gentleness. I am very fearful of hurting him again. "At home, when I ask to go anywhere, they tell me I am still a child, and you are much older than me. I don't mean that you are _old_," I add anxiously, "only a good deal older than I am; and perhaps when it was too late you would repent the step you had taken and wish you had chosen a wife older and wiser." I stop, amazed at my own eloquence and rather proud of myself. Never before have I made so long and so connected a speech. Really the "older and wiser" could scarcely have done better. The marrying in haste and repenting at leisure allusion appears to me very neat, and _ought_ to be effective. All is going on very well indeed, and I feel I could continue with dignity to the end, but that just at this moment I become conscious I am going to sneeze. Oh, horrible, unromantic thought! Will _nothing_ put it back for ten minutes--for even _five?_ I feel myself turning crimson, and certain admonitory twitchings in my nose warn me the catastrophe is close at hand. "Of course," says Mr. Carrington, in a low tone, "I know you _are_ very young" (it is coming) "only seventeen. And, and"--(_surely_ coming)--"I suppose twenty eight appears quite old to you." (In another instant I shall be disgraced forever.) "I look even older than I am. But good gracious Phyllis, is anything the matter with you?" "Nothing, nothing," I murmur, with a last frantic effort at pride and dignity, "only a--a--snee--eeze--atchu--atchu--atchu!" There is a most awful pause, and then Mr. Carrington, after a vain endeavor to suppress it, bursts into an unrestrained fit of laughter, in which without hesitation I join him. Indeed, now the crisis is over and my difficult and new-born dignity is a thing of the past, I feel much more comfortable and pleasanter in every way.