She sat by a little table and he sat on the other side of it with a book in his hands, and she let her hand fall on the table so that it lay flat, very white and soft and pink at the finger-tips, and in her wrist was the most delicious little bone. He could see nothing else. He gazed and gazed at it, then with a wrench turned to his book, but his eyes were swimming so that the words swallowed each other up. Roses nodded in at the window, and the smell of the salt water came up and mingled with the garden scents. "It is most moving," said Miss Martha. "Most," stuttered the Curate, and he looked up and saw warmth and mischief in her eyes, and almost imperceptibly she edged her hand a little nearer to him. Her aunt came in on that, and Francis heaved an immense sigh of relief and went spluttering on with his reading as though he had been caught out in some shameful act. When he left the house later in the evening he admitted to himself that he was in love, and that Miss Martha was the most beautiful, the most peerless, the most chaste, the most innocent of women, and he called his emotion "gross desire" and tried to strangle it, and suffered horribly. The more he wrestled with it, the more powerful it grew. He was in love, and love swamped all his thoughts. He took long solitary walks, and he hated all the couples whom he married and envied them. They had passed through torment--Oh! who was the fool who said that love was sweet? The old fleeting devotions had been delicious--if shameful; but this, this was fire in the veins, scalding thoughts, an obsession, a fixed idea. More to be rid of it than with any hope of success, he called upon Miss Martha's aunt, and, coming straight to the point, blurted out that he hoped she could regard him favourably as a suitor and would grant him permission to ask for her niece's hand in marriage--exactly as Miss Martha's aunt had planned that he should when he first came to Potsham and she had satisfied herself as to his antecedents. He explained that he was not rich but had every hope of being given a family living as soon as one should fall vacant. To his amazement he was informed that Miss Martha was something of an heiress, and would own, when she came of age, thirteen houses in Potsham, subject to leases, and one mortgage, a farm on Dartmoor, and fifty acres in Cornwall. Her niece, the aunt added, had often expressed her great admiration for Mr. Folyat, and, with her eyes gleaming exultation and beatitude, she confessed that she could desire no better thing than to see such coincidence between her own wishes and her niece's affections.