"I'll marry you, if you'll have me, and make a very good wife to you," she says, simply, with unblushing calmness, eyelids unlowered, and voice unwavering. "Child!" he cries, "you are very generous, but do you think I cannot be generous too?" "It is not generosity," she says, eagerly; "I _wish_ to marry you!" He shakes his head sadly. "You don't know what you are saying," he answers, taking her little hand between both his--holding it almost fatherly, in a tender prison. "You don't know what marriage is. You don't understand that a union so close with a person you don't love would be infinitely worse than being tied to a dead body; the one could not last very long, the other might for years." She looks at him silently, with her grave, innocent eyes, for an instant or two while she tries to get down to the depth of her own heart--tries to feel something besides that numb vague indifference to everything. "If I don't love you," she says, doubtfully, "I love nobody; I like you better than anyone else in the world! Didn't Jack die in your arms?" she says, breaking out into sudden and violent tears. "Wasn't his head resting on your shoulder when he went away? Oh, dear, dear shoulder!" she cries, kissing it passionately. "How can I help loving you for that?" At the touch of her soft mouth, that has been to him hitherto, despite his nominal betrothal, a sealed book, his steadfast heart begins to pulse frantically fast: if a river of flame instead of blood were poured through his veins, they could not have throbbed with an insaner heat: his sober head swims as one that is dizzy with strong drink; reels in the overpowering passion of a man that has not frittered away his heart in little bits, after our nineteenth-century fashion, but has cast it down, _whole_, unscarred by any other smallest wound, at one woman's feet. Oh, if he might but take her at her word! Or, if there must be no marriage between them, why may not there be a brief sweet marriage of the lips? It would do her no harm--since kisses, happily for the reputation of ninety-nine hundredths of the female world, leave no mark--and it would set him for an instant on a pinnacle of bliss that would equal him with the high gods. But the paroxysm is short. Before she who has caused it has guessed at its existence, it is put down, held down strongly. Women are very often like naughty children, putting a lighted match to a train of gunpowder, and then surprised and frightened because there is an explosion. "You are deceiving yourself," he says, speaking almost coldly. "You think you like me, because I happened to be the last person that was with the dear fellow that's gone--because you knew that I was grieved about him too: but think of me as you thought of me when you were at the Gerards', and you'll know how much you love me for myself."