“It is my turn now to cry out nonsense, my darling, for I do not believe that my love is hopeless. I saw in your sweet, shy eyes just now a tenderness that belonged not to ‘some one else,’ but to me. Look up, Louise, and own that in these weeks while we seemed to be playing at cross purposes we were falling headlong into love!” She tried to deny it, but the usually pert little tongue faltered under his quizzical and tender gaze. “Let me alone!” she began frantically, but Cecil Laurens’ arms had slipped around her waist and he smothered the remonstrating words on her lips with a long, sweet, lingering, lover’s kiss--one that seemed to draw the girl’s pure soul from her body and merge it into his. Faint with the sweetness of this exquisite emotion, Molly rested passive in his clasp for a moment, then drawing back from him, sighed bitterly. “Oh, this is dreadful! Why did I ever come to Ferndale?” she exclaimed to herself, while Cecil Laurens’ eyes glowed upon her full of passionate love. Under their warmth, the girl hung her head bashfully, all her usual effrontery conquered by the thrilling consciousness of her love and the bitter pain she suffered in her secret knowledge of its folly. “Ah, if he but _knew_!” she thought with an inward shudder, and looking up at him with eyes full of pain, she said: “I did not try to make you love me, you must always remember that!” He laughed as he answered: “No, you did not court my love, dear, certainly. I never saw a rose so full of thorns as this one that I have won.” “You have not won me!” she cried with a frightened start, but the triumphant lover, sure of his prize, replied: “I do not think you will deny that your heart is mine, Louise, although I no more tried to win your love than you did mine. But this being so, the fact remains we were mutually strongly attracted to each other, so we must charge our union to the score of fate.” “A strange fate!” Molly muttered, but her lover, who saw nothing but perfection now, where a short while ago he found so much fault, answered fondly: “A very beneficent fate. Only think, we shall not only make ourselves happy by our marriage, but we shall please our families, who have been neighbors and intimates almost a century.” “I have not said I would marry you, Mr. Laurens!” she cried out, quickly, more and more frightened, but he only smiled at what seemed to him maidenly bashfulness. “Marriage naturally follows love like ours, dear,” he said, tenderly. “And, Louise, darling, I shall make you a very good husband. You will not find me such a bear as I have been these past weeks, when your coldness hurt my unconscious love and stung me to anger. You will be different, too, my pet, for our love will change our thoughts and our lives.” “Yes,” she murmured, faintly, for she knew far better than he the extent of that change, but just now she did not contradict him again.