t my judgment. It is because you
are eloquent. If I had been told this morning that I should consent to
consider you as a possible husband, I should have thought my informant
a little crazy. I AM listening to you, you see!" And she threw her hands
out for a moment and let them drop with a gesture in which there was
just the slightest expression of appealing weakness.

"Well, as far as saying goes, I have said everything," said Newman. "I
believe in you, without restriction, and I think all the good of you
that it is possible to think of a human creature. I firmly believe that
in marrying me you will be SAFE. As I said just now," he went on with
a smile, "I have no bad ways. I can DO so much for you. And if you are
afraid that I am not what you have been accustomed to, not refined
and delicate and punctilious, you may easily carry that too far. I AM
delicate! You shall see!"

Madame de Cintre walked some distance away, and paused before a great
plant, an azalea, which was flourishing in a porcelain tub before her
window. She plucked off one of the flowers and, twisting it in her
fingers, retraced her steps. Then she sat down in silence, and her
attitude seemed to be a consent that Newman should say more.

"Why should you say it is impossible you should marry?" he continued.
"The only thing that could make it really impossible would be your being
already married. Is it because you have been unhappy in marriage? That
is all the more reason! Is it because your family exert a pressure upon
you, interfere with you, annoy you? That is still another reason; you
ought to be perfectly free, and marriage will make you so. I don't say
anything against your family--understand that!" added Newman, with
an eagerness which might have made a perspicacious observer smile.
"Whatever way you feel toward them is the right way, and anything that
you should wish me to do to make myself agreeable to them I will do as
well as I know how. Depend upon that!"

Madame de Cintre rose again and came toward the fireplace, near which
Newman was standing. The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed
out of her face, and it was illuminated with something which, this time
at least, Newman need not have been perplexed whether to attribute to
habit or to intention, to art or to nature. She had the air of a woman
who has stepped across the frontier of friendship and, looking around
her, finds the region vast. A certain checked and controlled exalta