"The end of a dream of success. Mr Penwynn will say, what right have I to think of you? He will call me adventurer, ask me how I dared to presume, and bid me never enter his house again. I am his servant, and it will be just." "My father will be just," said Rhoda, gazing in his face; "and if he is surprised and angry at first, he loves me too well to cause me pain. Geoffrey: I am not ashamed of my choice." He held her hands, looking down at her proudly, wondering that he had not loved her from the first. "You will succeed, Geoffrey," she continued, "and we can wait, for we are young yet. My father, I know, already likes you for the same reason that you first won my esteem." "And why was that?" he said, smiling. "You are so different to any one we ever knew before." "Yes," he said at last, "we can wait." And so they were pledged one to the other. Geoffrey never seemed to know how it had happened; Rhoda could not have told when it was she began to love; but they both knew, as by a sudden inspiration, that they loved the deeper and stronger for the calmness upon the surface of their lives. There was no passionate wooing, there were no vows of constancy, all was simplicity itself; but the foundation upon which their love had been reared seemed firm as the granite around promised to be lasting; as the sea whose ripples were now golden in the setting sun, whose warm glow seemed to glorify the face of Rhoda, and intensify the love-light that glanced from her eyes. It was a time of calm, and peace, and rest, and as in the midst of this new joy, the quaint idea suggested itself that their love seemed somehow associated with the scent of the wild thyme they crushed beneath their feet, they stood there in silence, drinking in deep mental draughts of the new sensation, and wondering at their happiness the while. CHAPTER THIRTY TWO. WITHIN TOUCH OF WEALTH. "Thank you, Trethick," said Mr Penwynn, the next morning, and he looked very calm and stern as he spoke, "I expected this, for my daughter told me all last night. I might have known this would happen, though I confess to having been very blind. Now go on, what have you further to say? But, first of all, you are a man of sense and some experience in the world. You do not, you cannot, expect me to sanction your addresses?" "No, sir, not now. I only ask you to put no pressure upon either of us, but to let us be free." "In other words, give you the run of my house, and ample time for follies. You don't want to come and live upon me?"