“You do not love me, yet you wish to be my wife! Aline, are you dreaming, or am I?” he asked, drawing her forward into the warmth of the bright fire, for little shivers of deadly cold were shaking the girlish form from head to foot. He saw a sudden, passionate pain flame into the pale face. She threw out her hand with a gesture of despair. “No, I am not dreaming, nor are you,” she said. “I would to God that we were! This reality is more horrible than any dream!” “But, why--why should you wish--wish to--to--” he began, and paused, unable to continue, and feeling a shamed consciousness of a fiery, uncontrollable color overspreading his face. To be wooed in this calm, business-like fashion by this ridiculous child was too strange, too absurd for anything, and yet there were little thrills of rapturous emotion tingling along his nerves, his heart was beating quickly with emotion. The girl’s eyes had wandered to the leaping flames of the firelight. She turned them back gravely to his face. “Why do I wish you to marry me?” she said. “I will tell you, Mr. Delaney. The secret of my stay in this house has been discovered!” “You have broken your oath!” he exclaimed in sudden anger. She stood before him in proud silence, neither denying nor assenting to his affirmation. Gazing at the fair face a moment he felt that he had wronged her by the brief suspicion. “Aline, forgive me. I see that I am suspecting you unjustly,” he said. “But tell me, who has revealed the secret?” “I do not know,” she answered. “But only a little while ago papa came in and charged me with it. He was very, very angry.” “Angry with you?” he questioned. “Angry with you,” she answered, a faint color creeping into the pallid face. “He told me that you had forever compromised my good name, and that I could never take my place in the world, in society, unless you married me.” She was speaking to him with the simple directness of a child. He was staggered by her simplicity--assurance he would have called it in any other woman. “And so he sent you here to ask me?” he said. A look of terror came over the fair face. She glanced around her, fearfully. “No, I have stolen away, and if he misses me he will come here to seek for me,” she said. “I must hurry back, but first I must have an answer to my question. Tell me, Mr. Delaney, will you do as I have asked you?” CHAPTER XLVIII. It was the strangest question Oran Delaney had ever heard from a girl’s lips. He said to himself that Aline Rodney’s simplicity was simply matchless. If she had been reared within the walls of a convent she could not have seemed more ignorant of the offense she was committing against society, against the creed of the whole world, in asking a man to marry her, and thus usurping his masculine prerogative. Breaking in upon his stupid silence, she continued: