"Very warm!" she laughed, struck again by his astuteness. "It was your hoodoo--Dr. Vivian! And, oh, now that I think of it, he gave me that other pointer, too,--about giving away money." Hugo replied: "The man seems to be dripping with wise old saws, in a thoroughly inexpensive sort of way.... Well, we'll show him something about giving away money some day." He was silent a moment, and Carlisle then remembered her thought of another large subscription to the Settlement, which she, for her part, could easily make now with fifty thousand dollars all her own. But Canning obliterated all such reflections by turning and taking her abruptly in his arms. "_This_ is what I want to make me happy. Darling--darling!..." They sat on the shabby old leather lounge which papa had held fast to, by winter and by summer, for thirty years. Here they had sat down soon after eight o'clock, and now the soft-toned chimes in the hall had just sounded eleven-thirty. In the first days of their engagement, Carlisle had observed that Hugo was "very demonstrative." And now, at the end of their loverly evening together, he became suddenly and strangely moved, professing, in a voice unlike his own, his inability to live longer without her. Then, ignoring all their elaborate plannings, he abruptly begged her to marry him in June, as he had first asked her.... "Why, Hugo!" she said, surprised and a little uncomfortable. "That's so much dear foolishness--and not a stitch of clothes made yet! October's just around the corner.... Do sit up, Hugo dear. There's papa, I think." Hugo sat up. Reason reasserted its sway. But later, Carlisle remembered this moment with a dim sense of trouble, not entirely new.... She wondered with a certain disquiet whether all this was some everlasting difference between men and women, or whether she, Carlisle, was by nature a cold and undemonstrative sort of person? Indeed, there did seem to be a falling short in her somehow; for if not with herself and the expressions of her love, with what was she to return Hugo's royal gifts?... There were three more days; and then young lovers must say farewell. In little more than a week they would meet again in New York; but still this seemed a real parting to both. It was the 13th of May, the day which marked the end of three weeks of cloudless skies. The rain long predicted by the weather sharps had come in the night, and the dreary downpour continued throughout the day. Each of the young pair seemed somehow conscious that the first chapter in their joint story had reached an end. Better days they might certainly have, but never again days just like these.... "Keep well, dear heart," begged Canning at the last, "and take care of all your loveliness for my sake." Proud of her beauty he ever was, and especially now when she was so soon to meet his mother in New York. And at the final parting, he said, visibly moved: