"Do you forget the flyleaf of the Prayer-book that----Hang it! I was on the point of uttering the forbidden name!" Smiling, he looks for an answering smile from her, but finds none. "I have heard of you as Esther Craven from my youth up," he continues. "Before you came we speculated as to what 'Esther' Craven would be like; it was only when you arrived _in propriá personâ_ that you rose into the dignity of 'Miss' Craven." "I hate being called Esther," she says, plaintively, with eyes down-drooped to the lush-green grasses that bow and make obeisance beneath her quick feet; "it always makes me feel as if I were in disgrace. Jack never calls me Esther unless he is vexed with me. Call me _Essie_, please." "Essie, then." "Well?" "I think it right to warn you" (putting an arm of resolute possession, bolder than ever poor Brandon's had been, round her supple figure--for who is there in these grey evening fields to witness the embrace?)--"I think it right to warn you that I may very possibly grow like Sir Thomas in time; they tell me that I have a look of him already. I do not see that myself; but, even if that does come to pass, can you promise to like me even then?" "Even then." "I may very probably d--n the servants, and be upset for a whole evening if there are lumps in the melted butter; I may very probably insist on your playing backgammon with me every evening, and insist, likewise, on your being invariably beaten. Can you bear even that?" "Even that." They both laugh; but in Esther's laugh there is a ring of bitterness, which she herself hears, and wonders that he does not. As they near the house, they see thin slits of crimson light through the dining-room shutters. Esther involuntarily quickens her pace. "Why are you in such a hurry?" he asks, his eyes shining eager with reproachful passion in the passionless white starlight. "Who knows? to-morrow we may be dead; to-day we are as gods, knowing good and evil. This walk has not been to you what it has to me, or you would be in no haste to end it." "I don't suppose it has," she answers, half-absently, with a sigh. He had expected an eager disclaimer, and is disappointed. "There can be but one explanation of that," he says, angrily. "If you only knew----," begins Esther, with an uncertain half-inclination to confess, though late. "If you are going to tell me anything disagreeable," he says, quickly putting his hand before her mouth, "stop! Tell me to-morrow, or the day after, but not now--not now! Let there be one day of my life on which I may look back and say, as God said when he looked back upon His new world, 'Behold, it is very good!'" She is silent. "And yet, perhaps, it would be better if I knew the end of your sentence; if I only knew--what?--how little you care about me?"