She reached out an anxious hand, and touched his shoulder. His eyes were playing with the pattern of the carpet; but he slowly raised them to hers, and looked for a moment without speaking. Suddenly, in spite of himself, he laughed--laughed outright, but not loudly. Marriage? Yes, here was the touchstone. Marry a girl whose family had been notable for hundreds of years? For the moment he did not remember his own family. This was one of the times when he was only conscious that he had savage blood, together with a strain of New World French, and that his life had mostly been a range of adventure and common toil. This new position was his right, but there were times when it seemed to him that he was an impostor; others, when he felt himself master of it all, when he even had a sense of superiority--why he could not tell; but life in this old land of tradition and history had not its due picturesqueness. With his grandmother’s proposal there shot up in him the thought that for him this was absurd. He to pace the world beside this fine queenly creature--Delia Gasgoyne--carrying on the traditions of the Belwards! Was it, was it possible? “Pardon me,” he said at last gently, as he saw Lady Belward shrink and then look curiously at him, “something struck me, and I couldn’t help it.” “Was what I said at all ludicrous?” “Of course not; you said what was natural for you to say, and I thought what was natural for me to think, at first blush.” “There is something wrong,” she urged fearfully. “Is there any reason why you cannot marry? Gaston,”--she trembled towards him,--“you have not deceived us--you are not married?” “My wife is dead, as I told you,” he answered gravely, musingly. “Tell me: there is no woman who has a claim on you?” “None that I know of--not one. My follies have not run that way.” “Thank God! Then there is no reason why you should not marry. Oh, when I look at you I am proud, I am glad that I live! You bring my youth, my son back; and I long for a time when I may clasp your child in my arms, and know that Robert’s heritage will go on and on, and that there will be made up to him, somehow, all that he lost. Listen: I am an old, crippled, suffering woman; I shall soon have done with all this coming and going, and I speak to you out of the wisdom of sorrow. Had Robert married, all would have gone well. He did not: he got into trouble, then came Ian’s hand in it all; and you know the end. I fear for you, I do indeed. You will have sore temptations. Marry--marry soon, and make us happy.” He was quiet enough now. He had seen the grotesque image, now he was facing the thing behind it. “Would it please you so very much?” he said, resting a hand gently on hers. “I wish to see a child of yours in my arms, dear.” “And the woman you have chosen is Delia Gasgoyne?” “The choice is for you; but you seem to like each other, and we care for her.” He sat thinking for a time, then he got up, and said slowly: