“Because I know that the sight of a face one loves and has longed to see can extinguish all hatred and anger, everything but happiness; just as your coming to-night has calmed down all my wicked feelings towards my uncle and towards--your poor little wife. I can forgive you for marrying her now--for the first time.” George was thunderstruck. All the passionate intensity with which the small, plain girl had loved him and longed for his success in life, had compassionated him and worked to retrieve his errors, blazed in her black eyes and seemed to cast a glow over her sallow face. Men are so much accustomed by reason and experience to associate women’s fragility of frame with frivolity of mind, that any sudden discovery of devoted singleness of purpose in one of the soft and foolish sex strikes them into as much distant awe and reverent worshipfulness as a manifestation of godhead in the flesh would do. So that George remained quite silent before Ella, with no inclination to thank her, but a strong impulse to fall on his knees. After nearly a minute’s silence, she said, in the same deep voice: “Will you promise me to see her first?” George looked at her in a sidelong, shamefaced way. “I will promise anything in the world you like,” he said huskily. She smiled happily, and taking his hand, made him sit down beside her. The joy of having procured his release had thrown her this evening into an exaltation of feeling which banished her usual awkwardness, and made her unreserved as only a shy person unusually moved can be. “Remember,” she said, “you have to save yourself up for a journey.” And she turned upon him the motherly look which shines out in the tenderness of all the best women. Ella was perfectly happy this evening, and had not an atom of jealousy that the thoughts of the man, in whose interest she could forget all scruples of prudery, were bent on another woman. She had done for him what his wife could not do; there was pride enough in that knowledge. There had been from the first so little selfishness in her love that by this time there was none--a not uncommon beauty of character in the plain of person who, expecting nothing, are more than content with a little. So she arranged all the details of the journey, and within a couple of hours she and her father and George were on their way back to England.