“Do you think I doubt that?” she said, her voice sounding so calm, so soft to his excited ear. “That is not the question; there are so many other things to think of. If you will not think for yourself, I must think for you. Oh, Rollo, no! I don’t see how it could be. Listen to me; you are too eager, oh! thank you, dear Rollo, too fond of me, to take everything into consideration--but _I_ must. Rollo! no, no; it would never do; how could it ever do, if you will only think? Supposing even that it did not matter for me, how could you marry your wife from any place but her home? It would not be creditable,” said Lottie, shaking her head with all the gentle superiority of reason, “it would not be right or becoming for you.” His arm relaxed round her; he tried to say something, but it died away in his throat. For the moment the man was conscious of nothing but a positive pang of gratitude for a danger escaped; he was safe, but he scarcely dared breathe. Had she understood him as he meant her to understand him, what vengeance would have flashed upon him, what thunderbolt scathed him! But for very terror he would have shrunk and hid his face now in the trembling of the catastrophe escaped. “More than that, even,” said Lottie, going on all unaware; “I have nothing, you know; and how could I take money--_money to live upon_--from _you_!--till I was married to you? No! it is impossible, impossible, Rollo. Oh! thank you, thank you a thousand times for having thought more of me than of anything else; but you see, don’t you see, how impossible it is? I will never forget,” said the girl softly, drawing a little closer to him who had fallen away from her in the strange tumult of failure--yet deliverance--which took all strength from him, “I will never forget that you were ready to forget everything that was reasonable, everything that was sensible, and even your own credit, for me!” Another pause, but this time indescribable. In her bosom gratitude, tender love, and that sweet sense of calmer judgment, of reason less influenced by passion than it would be fitting or right for his to be, which a woman loves to feel within herself--her modest prerogative in the supreme moment; in his a tumult of love, disappointment, relief, horror of himself, anger and shame, and the thrill of a hairbreadth escape. He could not say a word; what he had done seemed incredible to him. The most tremendous denunciation would not have humbled him as did her unconsciousness. He had made her the most villainous proposal, and she had not even known what it meant; to her it had seemed all generosity, love, and honour. His arm dropped from around her, he had no force to hold her, and some inarticulate exclamation--he could not tell what--sounded hoarsely in utter confusion and shame in his throat.