"Well;--I'm driving at this: that I think that you are bound to decide upon doing that which you feel to be wisest without reference to my feelings. Of course I love you better than anything in the world. I can't be so false as to say it isn't so. Indeed, to tell the truth, I don't know that I really ever loved anybody else. But if it is proper that we should be separated, I shall get over it,--in a way." "You mean you'd marry somebody else in the process of time." "No, Walter; I don't mean that. Women shouldn't make protestations; but I don't think I ever should. But a woman can live and get on very well without being married, and I should always have you in my heart, and I should try to comfort myself with remembering that you had loved me." "I am quite sure that I shall never marry anyone else," said the Captain. "You know what I'm driving at now;--eh, Walter?" "Partly." "I want you to know wholly. I told you this morning that I should leave it to you to decide. I still say the same. I consider myself for the present as much bound to obey you as though I were your wife already. But after saying that, and after hearing Aunt Sarah's sermon, I felt that I ought to make you understand that I am quite aware that it may be impossible for you to keep to your engagement. You understand all that better than I do. Our engagement was made when you thought you had money, and even then you felt that there was little enough." "It was very little." "And now there is none. I don't profess to be afraid of poverty myself, because I don't quite know what it means." "It means something very unpleasant." "No doubt; and it would be unpleasant to be parted;--wouldn't it?" "It would be horrible." She pressed his arm again as she went on. "You must judge between the two. What I want you to understand is this, that whatever you may judge to be right and best, I will agree to it, and will think that it is right and best. If you say that we will get ourselves married and try it, I shall feel that not to get ourselves married and not to try it is a manifest impossibility; and if you say that we should be wrong to get married and try it, then I will feel that to have done so was quite a manifest impossibility." "Mary," said he, "you're an angel." "No; but I'm a woman who loves well enough to be determined not to hurt the man she loves if she can help it." "There is one thing on which I think we must decide." "What is that?" "I must at any rate go out before we are married." Mary Lowther felt this to be a decision in her favour,--to be a decision which for the time made her happy and light-hearted. She had so dreaded a positive and permanent separation, that the delay seemed to her to be hardly an evil. CHAPTER XXXII. MR. GILMORE'S SUCCESS.