She crawled to the foot of the bed, and stretching over the rail to the dressing-table, on which George had placed the volume, she recovered it with a violent muscular effort, and turned back the leaves to the title-page. “This book was published in 1823; so you are much older than you told me you were, I see,” she said simply, while George, unable to contain himself longer, burst out into a long laugh, and made a dive at her, which she evaded like a squirrel, still staring at him with unmoved gravity, so that his mirth died away in wonderment and in a rush of tenderness as he perceived the pathos of this futile plunge into the mazes of learning. As he recovered his gravity the expression of her mobile face also changed; after a moment’s shy silence their eyes met, and each saw the other through a luminous mist. “What are you crying for?” she asked tremulously; and in a moment flung herself impulsively into his ready arms. “Why didn’t you marry Ella?” was her next question, shot suddenly into his ear in the midst of an incoherent outburst of the passionate tenderness that glowed ever in his heart for her. “Marry Ella!” said he, feeling a shock of surprise at the remembrance that he had indeed once offered to make the good little blue-stocking his wife. “Why, what makes you ask such a question as that? Are you jealous?” “Oh, no. But I see that she would have had you, and therefore you were foolish not to have her.” “Well, I’m afraid it’s too late now, and I shall have to put up with the consequences of my folly,” said he, pressing her tenderly to him. “That’s just what I thought,” she agreed quite plaintively. “Miss Glass says a good wife must cook, Ella says a good wife must read, but nobody says a good wife must just sing and laugh and amuse herself as I do. And so when you’re tired of kissing me, you will feel you had better not have married me, but only have amused yourself like Dicky Wood--” She paused significantly. “Dicky Wood!” echoed he sharply. “--With Chloris White.” George moved uneasily; he was angry and disturbed. “You must not say such things--you must not think them. The name of such a woman as that is not fit to pass your lips.” “But, George,” she argued, looking straight into his eyes with penetrating shrewdness, “if you had not been you, say, if you had been Rahas or Captain Pascoe, I might--” He stopped the words upon her lips with a great gravity which awed her and kept her very still, very attentive, while he spoke.