"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me, that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?" "Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it." "It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as something concrete, graspable. "It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could take everything for granted, everything." "Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?" "Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him. "If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly that she shouldn't see how he trembled. "I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist. "Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her go. "Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of tea." IV "Peter, have you any idea what I am thinking about?" "Not in the least, Ellen," which was not strictly the truth. He supposed she must be thinking naturally of the news he had told her not an hour since, of his engagement to Eunice Goodward. It lay so close to the surface of his own mind at all times that the slightest stir of conversation, like the wind above a secret rose, seemed always about to disclose it. They were sitting on the porch at Bloombury and the pointed swallows pitched and darted about the eaves. "It was the smell of the dust that reminded me," said Ellen, "and the wild rose at the turn of the road; you can smell it as plain as plain when the air lifts a little. Do you remember a picnic that we were invited to and couldn't go? It was on account of being poor ... and I was just finding it out. I found out a good many things that summer; about my always going to be lame and what it would mean to us. It was dreadful to me that I couldn't be lame just by myself, but I had to mix up you and mother in it." "We were glad, Ellen, to be mixed up in it if it made things easier for you."