"You believe in love, then?" she asked, with a twinkling, upward glance. "I am forced to." "And yet you can deny the soul?" "How far these questions are psychic and how far material is still sub judice," said the Professor, with an air of toleration. "Protoplasm may prove to be the physical basis of love as well as of life." "How inflexible you are!" she exclaimed; "you would draw love down to the level of physics." "Or draw physics up to the level of love." "Come, that is much better," she cried, with her sympathetic laugh. "That is really very pretty, and puts science in quite a delightful light." Her eyes sparkled, and she tossed her chin with the pretty, wilful air of a woman who is mistress of the situation. "I have reason to believe," said the Professor, "that my position here will prove to be only a stepping-stone to some wider scene of scientific activity. Yet, even here, my chair brings me in some fifteen hundred pounds a year, which is supplemented by a few hundreds from my books. I should therefore be in a position to provide you with those comforts to which you are accustomed. So much for my pecuniary position. As to my constitution, it has always been sound. I have never suffered from any illness in my life, save fleeting attacks of cephalalgia, the result of too prolonged a stimulation of the centres of cerebration. My father and mother had no sign of any morbid diathesis, but I will not conceal from you that my grandfather was afflicted with podagra." Mrs. O'James looked startled. "Is that very serious?" she asked. "It is gout," said the Professor. "Oh, is that all? It sounded much worse than that." "It is a grave taint, but I trust that I shall not be a victim to atavism. I have laid these facts before you because they are factors which cannot be overlooked in forming your decision. May I ask now whether you see your way to accepting my proposal?" He paused in his walk, and looked earnestly and expectantly down at her. A struggle was evidently going on in her mind. Her eyes were cast down, her little slipper tapped the lawn, and her fingers played nervously with her chatelain. Suddenly, with a sharp, quick gesture which had in it something of <i>abandon</i> and recklessness, she held out her hand to her companion. "I accept," she said. They were standing under the shadow of the hawthorn. He stooped gravely down, and kissed her glove-covered fingers. "I trust that you may never have cause to regret your decision," he said. "I trust that you never may," she cried, with a heaving breast. There were tears in her eyes, and her lips twitched with some strong emotion. "Come into the sunshine again," said he. "It is the great restorative. Your nerves are shaken. Some little congestion of the medulla and pons. It is always instructive to reduce psychic or emotional conditions to their physical equivalents. You feel that your anchor is still firm in a bottom of ascertained fact."