Kneeling on the rug at their feet, Sally looked from one to the other with an appealing and tender glance. "You brought him back because he told you that he loved you?" said Miss Mitty again, as if her closed mind had refused to admit the words she had uttered. "Well, only partly because of that, Aunt Mitty," replied Sally bravely, "the rest was because--because I told him that I loved him." For a moment there was a tense and unnatural silence in the midst of which I heard the sharp crackling of the fire and smelt the faint sweet smell of the burning cedar. The two aunts looked at each other over the kneeling girl, and it seemed to me that the long, narrow faces had grown suddenly pinched and old. "I--I don't think we understood quite what you said, Sally dear," said Miss Matoaca, in a hesitating voice; and I felt sorry for her as she spoke--sorry for them both because the edifice of their beliefs and traditions, reared so patiently through the centuries by dead Fairfaxes and Blands, had crumbled about their ears. "What she means, Miss Matoaca," I said gently, coming forward into the firelight, "is that I have asked her to marry me." "To marry you--you--Ben Starr?" exclaimed Miss Mitty abruptly, rising from her chair, and then falling nervelessly back. "There is some mistake--not that I doubt," she added courteously, the generations of breeding overcoming her raw impulse of horror, "not that I doubt for a minute that you are an estimable and deserving character--General Bolingbroke tells me so and I trust his word. But Sally marry you! Why, your father--I beg your pardon for reminding you of it--your father was not even an educated man." "No," I replied, "my father was not an educated man, but I am." "That speaks very well for you, sir, I am sure--but how--how could my niece marry a man who--I apologise again for alluding to your origin--whose father was a stone-cutter--I have heard?" "Yes, he was a stone-cutter, and I am sorry to say wasn't even a good one." "I don't know that good or bad makes a difference, except, of course, as it affected his earning a livelihood. But the fact remains that he was a common workman and that no member of our family on either side has ever been even remotely connected with trade. Surely, you yourself, Mr. Starr, must be aware that my niece and you are not in the same walk of life. Do you not realise the impossibility of--of the connection you speak of?" "I realised it so much," I answered, "that until I met her this afternoon I had determined to wait five--perhaps ten years before asking her to become my wife." "Ten years? But what can ten years have to do with it? Families are not made in ten years, Mr. Starr, and how could that length of time alter the fact that your father was a person of no education and that you yourself are a self-made man?" "I am not ashamed to offer her the man after he is made," I replied. "What I did not think worthy of her was the man in the making."