"Marion, do not think me so selfish as not to have thought about that. It should be only the better for them all. I can earn quite enough for you and me too, and so you would have the more time to give to them. I should never have dreamed of asking you to leave them. There are things in which a dog may help a man, doing what the man can't do: there may be things in which a man might help an angel." Deeply moved by the unselfishness of his love, Marion could not help a pressure of her hands against the face which had sought refuge within them. Roger fell to kissing them wildly. But Marion was a woman; and women, I think, though I may be only judging by myself and my husband, look forward and round about, more than men do: they would need at all events; therefore Marion saw other things. A man-reader may say, that, if she loved him, she would not have thus looked about her; and that, if she did not love him, there was no occasion for her thus to fly in the face of the future. I can only answer that it is allowed on all hands women are not amenable to logic: look about her Marion did, and saw, that, as a married woman, she might be compelled to forsake her friends more or less; for there might arise other and paramount claims on her self-devotion. In a word, if she were to have children, she would have no choice in respect to whose welfare should constitute the main business of her life; and it even became a question whether she would have a right to place them in circumstances so unfavorable for growth and education. Therefore, to marry might be tantamount to forsaking her friends. But where was the need of any such mental parley? Of course, she couldn't marry Roger. How could she marry a man she couldn't look up to? And look up to him she certainly did not, and could not. "No, Roger," she said, this last thought large in her mind; and, as she spoke, she withdrew her hands, "it mustn't be. It is out of the question: I can't look up to you," she added, as simply as a child. "I should think not," he burst out. "That _would_ be a fine thing! If you looked up to a fellow like me, I think it would almost cure me of looking up to you; and what I want is to look up to you every day and all day long: only I can do that whether you let me or not." "But I don't choose to have a--a--friend to whom I can't look up." "Then I shall never be even a friend," he returned sadly. "But I would have tried hard to be less unworthy of you." At this precise moment, Marion caught sight of a pair of great round blue eyes, wide open under a shock of red hair, about three feet from the floor, staring as if they had not winked for the last ten minutes. The child looked so comical, that Marion, reading perhaps in her looks the reflex of her own position, could not help laughing. Roger started up in dismay, but, beholding the apparition, laughed also. "Please, grannie," said the urchin, "mother's took bad, and want's ye."