'My reasons now for being so firm are very simple. You told me some time ago you would marry me, in spite of my religious beliefs or disbeliefs. After that you, imagining my faith had returned, promise my mother not to fix the day while I suffer from any form of unbelief. After that, while you are still under the belief I have come back to my old faith, you promise to marry me within a month, within three weeks. Thus you made the promise to my mother and the promise to me under the same mistake. Both these promises are cancelled, by the fact that they were made under a false impression. Therefore, neither your refusing to marry me, nor your marrying me within a month or three weeks, is obligatory according to your promises, _but_ the promise you made me in Lincoln's Inn Fields was not qualified, nor has it been cancelled in any way. It is the only promise I now look upon as existing between you and me, and I know you are too simple and honourable a nature to allow yourself in any way to cloud your mind as to the line of your duty. 'What I have written is, I know, my darling, more like a letter of business than of love; but then our present business is love, and I want to put the rational aspect, the just aspect of the position before you. You will not need to know what my feelings are. In that most delicious hour in the conservatory you said you were mine, body and soul. I now claim your obedience to my will in this case. 'My own darling Marie, I can hardly bring myself to think I am so near as a month to the moment when you will be mine, and no power on earth can ever part us again. A month, a little month of thirty days! Only a month. I know many men think the month before they receive the hand they court a century. To me it seems but an hour, a moment. I am not a child, impatient to possess a new toy. I am a man who has set his heart on obtaining a noble object, and I am so profoundly grateful for my success I can think of nothing but that some day soon you will be mine. The fact that you will be mine is everything. I could have waited for you years. But as you said, the sooner the better.--I am, my darling love, your own sweetheart, George. When she had read this letter she put it down in her lap. A soft, pensive smile stole over her face, and she murmured, 'My George, my George, my own George. My great-hearted, my noble love!' She read the letter again. Yes, it was quite right. Everything he said was perfectly true and just. He never could have made it so clear to her if he had been present, for she would only have heard the music of his voice; and although she would have taken for granted all he said, her mind would not have got so clear an idea of her duty as from this letter.