"Yes,--I mean I never get on with them quite as well as other fellows do somehow--and--er--and--what I want to say, Miss Mary, is that I've never got on with any woman so well as I have with you--and----" He paused. At no time in his life had he been at such a loss for language. His heart was thumping in the most extraordinary fashion, and he prodded the end of his walking-stick into the ground with quite a ferocious earnestness. She was still looking at him and still smiling. "And," he went on ramblingly, "that's why I hope we shall always be good friends." As he uttered this perfectly commonplace remark, he cursed himself for a fool. "What's the matter with me?" he inwardly demanded. "My tongue seems to be tied up!--or I'm going to have lockjaw! It's awful! Something better than this has got to come out of me somehow!" And acting on a brilliant flash of inspiration which suddenly seemed to have illumined his brain, he said-- "The fact is, I want to get married. I'm thinking about it." How quiet she was! She seemed scarcely to breathe. "Yes?" and the word, accentuated without surprise and merely as a question, was spoken very gently. "I do hope you have found some one who loves you with all her heart!" She turned her head away, and Angus saw, or thought he saw, the bright tears brim up from under her lashes and slowly fall. Without another instant's pause he rushed upon his destiny, and in that rush grew strong. "Yes, Mary!" he said, and moving to her side he caught her hand in his own--"I dare to think I have found that some one! I believe I have! I believe that a woman whom I love with all my heart, loves me in return! If I am mistaken, then I've lost the whole world! Tell me, Mary! Am I wrong?" She could not speak,--the tears were thick in her eyes. "Mary--dear, dearest Mary!" and he pressed the hand he held--"You know I love you!--you know----" She turned her face towards him--a pale, wondering face,--and tried to smile. "How do I know?" she murmured tremulously--"How can I believe? I'm past the time for love!" For all answer he drew her into his arms. "Ask Love itself about that, Mary!" he said. "Ask my heart, which beats for you,--ask my soul, which longs for you!--ask me, who worship you, you, best and dearest of women, about the time for love! That time for us is now, Mary!--now and always!" Then came a silence--that eloquent silence which surpasses all speech. Love has no written or spoken language--it is incommunicable as God. And Mary, whose nature was open and pure as the daylight, would not have been the woman she was if she could have expressed in words the deep tenderness and passion which at that supreme moment silently responded to her lover's touch, her lover's embrace. And when,--lifting her face between his two hands, he gazed at it long and earnestly, a smile, shining between tears, brightened her sweet eyes.