"I am going back with you when you leave. I have to make the acquaintance of your people. That is a necessary preliminary. Afterwards we will speed matters, and get married without undue delay. There isn't any object in waiting, is there? I don't feel that I can wait. I want you so." "I'll have to resign my position as music teacher," she said. "There is nothing else to consider. You know, I can't quite realise it yet. It all seems so strange and wonderful." "It is wonderful," he answered gravely. "It's wonderful to me that you should love me. It seems more wonderful still that you trust me. Your belief in me has been more helpful than any sermon. It is a sermon. It's a sort of religion. I've leaned on you... you little thing, whom I could pick up and toss over my shoulder! Dear, you'll never know how much I love you. I can't put it into words." She squeezed his hand understandingly. It was the same with her. She could never have told him all that was in her heart. "There isn't any need for words," she said softly. "No." He looked at her quickly. "You do understand," he said. "You've always understood. From the first we seemed to strike the same thoughts instinctively. We get at one another somehow. I feel as if I had known you all my life." "And I," she answered with a shy little laugh, "feel that I am only beginning to know you. Each time I am with you something fresh and unexpected leaps to the surface, and I've got to start again from the beginning and reconstruct all my ideas of you. I wonder if it will always be like that?" "You will find me consistent in one respect anyhow," he answered. He drew her into the shadow of some trees towards which their steps had been directed, and came to a halt facing her, and dropped her hand and put his arms around her. "Now..." he said. He held her closely and for the first time kissed her lips. Book 2--CHAPTER NINETEEN. Esme was married from her sister's house very quietly, and with what Rose considered quite unnecessary haste. The whole affair was so sudden and so altogether unexpected that she scarcely knew whether to be the more pleased or the more dismayed by her sister's change of fortune. She never felt quite at ease with her future brother-in-law, and in her heart she regretted that it was not George Sinclair upon whom Esme's choice had fallen. Marriage with Hallam meant a more complete separation from the old life: it would remove the girl altogether from her former associations. While she recognised the worldly advantages of the match she resented this: had Esme married Sinclair they would have continued in touch with one another. But Hallam intended making his home in Cape Town, in one of the suburbs, after a prolonged honeymoon spent in Europe. The honeymoon, she gathered, would extend over a year. It was all very amazing and rather wonderful. And Esme appeared to be supremely happy; that, after all, was the chief thing.