Then she told him what had occurred during the night; and for an hour, until the sun had risen far above the heaving waters, they talked of the past and the present. There was a future which was still nearer to the thoughts of Eliot Buckstone. What he had spoken before, he spoke again. Once more he told his story of love, and begged her, in her present extremity, to give him the legal right to become her friend and protector. Now he spoke to more willing ears than ever before. Without saying that she loved him with her whole heart and soul, she accepted his proffered love; and when she had done so, the great black clouds seemed to be rolled back, and she smiled upon him. “Mine, mine, forever!” said the rapturous artist, as he seated himself by her side in the boat, and passing his arm around her waist, he imprinted upon her lips the first kiss. “Will you always love me thus?” she replied, feeling that, if he did, he would soon become to her more than all the world beside, if he was not now. “Always, Mary, always! There shall be no change, or suspicion of change, in me--never, Mary! I have loved you with all my heart from the first moment I saw you. When I looked into the boat, still struggling for breath, I was almost petrified by the vision of loveliness which greeted me. Mary, I had seen you thousands of times before.” “Seen me before?” “In my dreams of paradise! In my visions of the glorious and the beautiful of earth! I have seen you on my canvas ere the pencil had traced a line, and I would have given my life for the power to transfer my bright ideal upon its waiting surface. But even fairer than the thought is the loving, breathing being I press to my heart;” and he suited the action to the word. “I am afraid this is too poetic to be real,” replied she, her confidence in the man she had accepted not increased by the glowing strains in which he spoke. “It is all real. I see you; I touch you. Mary, you know not what I have felt, what I have hoped and feared, how I have trembled for myself, since I first saw you. Mary, let me live for you. I ask nothing better of this world; and if I have you in the next, I can dream of no purer happiness.” “But I am a wanderer and an outcast now,” she said, looking sad again. “Not a wanderer, and you can never be an outcast from my heart, Mary.” “I have no place to lay my head. Let us go to the village now. I would have gone without your knowledge, but Providence has thrown you into my path. Let us return now, Mr.----” “Eliot,” he interposed. “Eliot! I will go on my way rejoicing now. When I reach Newington, I will write to you, and then----” “No, Mary, you shall not go to Newington, or anywhere else, without me,” protested Mr. Buckstone, earnestly. “I should be a villain if I permitted you, in our present relations, to expose yourself to the perils and privations which would surround you in a strange place, where you had none to care for you.”