"You did, and rightly _then_, for I did not fully appreciate your pure womanly affection. I thought I could easily win you, and having lost you I loved you more. Lulu, I am woefully in earnest. Refuse me now, and you, perhaps, drive me away from you for years--it may be forever. I love you more than I did then--a thousand times better." Still she is silent. "Brownie," he pleads, "I am not so fickle as you think me. I have fancied many pretty women, but only loved two--Grace Grey and yourself. My love for her is a thing of the past, and has to do with the past only--'echoes of harp-strings that broke long ago'--my love for you is a thing of the present, and will influence my whole future. You can make of me a nobler man than what I am. Willard is willing, your mother is willing, I have asked them both. Brownie, let us make of that Continental trip a wedding tour?" Her shy eyes lifted, meeting in his a deeper love than she has ever expected to see in them for her. "Let me see," he goes on, "Aunt Conway and I are going to Europe in June--that is time enough for you to get ready. Think of it, Brownie, I am to be gone months and months. Can you bear to let me go alone?" "No, I cannot," she sobs, hiding her face against his shoulder; and Bruce takes her in his arms and kisses her with a genuine fondness, prizing her, after the fashion of most men, all the better because she was so hard to win. CHAPTER XX. WEDDING CARDS. "Now she adores thee as one without spot, Dreams not of sorrow to darken her lot, Joyful, yet tearful, I yield her to thee; Take her, the light of thy dwelling to be." Fair Lulu found so little time amid the preparations that went so swiftly forward for her marriage that she was very glad to avail herself of Grace's offered assistance in looking after her poor people, her missionary box, &c., and so the lonely and depressed young creature found something to occupy her time as well as to fill up her thoughts. She was of great assistance, too, to Lulu in the selection and purchase of the bridal trousseau in which she took a pleasant feminine interest. Lulu, who deferred always to her friend's exquisite taste, would suffer nothing to be purchased until first pronounced _comme il faut_ by Mrs. Winans; and Bruce Conway, who had returned in the midst of the season from Washington, and haunted Lulu's steps with lover-like devotion, declared that his most dangerous rival in Lulu's heart was Mrs. Winans. The old yearning passion he had felt for Grace had passed into a dream of the past; something he never liked to recall, because there was something of pain about it still like the soreness of an old wound--"what deep wound ever healed without a scar?" But they were very good friends now--not cordial--they would never be that, but still very pleasant and genial to each other.