The books tumbled once more out of John’s hold: they lay upon the mossy grass amicably in company with the overturned basket, where old Betty’s little packets of tea and sugar peeped out as if to inquire what was the cause of all this commotion. John stooped over the hands that had caught his arm, putting down his head upon them. His heart was going like one of the clanging engines with which he was so familiar. He half forgot that Elly was the cause, in the necessity he felt to tell her of his trouble, and be comforted by her sympathy. And they were so close that Elly felt the vibration in him and was half frightened by it, yet anxious only to soothe him. ‘Oh, what is it? Tell me, tell me!’ she said. ‘Elly, do you remember what I said to you the first day? It is all changed between us, though you thought it need not be. I felt it then, the first day. I had no right---- Do they think I don’t know that as well as they do? I have no right. And yet I can’t give you up, and go away, and hear of you marrying some one else, and having nothing more to do with me. It’s not possible, it’s not possible!--I can’t, Elly, let you go and give you up, and be nothing more to you, nor you to me. Elly! don’t say you want me to do that.’ He was half leaning his weight upon her, quite unconsciously making her slight figure sway and tremble. ‘Jack,’ she said, her voice trembling too. ‘Is there nothing else that makes you unhappy but only about you and me?’ ‘Isn’t that enough?’ he said, with something of the petulance of passionate feeling, raising his head to look her indignantly in her face. ‘Enough for trouble,’ said Elly, shaking her head; ‘but unhappy is a dreadful word.’ ‘Not so dreadful,’ said he, looking at her, not as if she were the arbiter of fate, but with that intense desire for her sympathy which seemed now his first feeling. ‘Not half so dreadful as if I have to give up and go away?’ ‘And who is there,’ said Elly, on her side, with a little glow of indignation too, ‘that can make you give up and go away?’ Then they stood for a moment and looked at each other, far too much in earnest and too serious to think of confusion, or blushes, or any of the commonplaces of love-making. At last he said, taking her hands, ‘No one, Elly, if you don’t----’ ‘You know,’ she said, still indignantly, ‘that I shan’t. Why should you give up and go away?’ ‘Because I am not good enough for you, Elly. That’s all quite true, not half good enough.’ ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘you have not any money, Jack. But what does that matter? You will have some, some day. We can wait. That is nothing to be unhappy about, anyhow.’ ‘There is to me, and there is to them. I’d like you to have everything, Elly; do you think I could live to bring you to poverty? It wrings my heart to think of it; that you, who are a lady born, and are too good for a prince, should come to poverty through me.’