she answered sweetly. She paused likewise, requiring
nothing more; it was enough that he should speak her name.

He changed his position and sat looking ahead. Presently he began
again, choosing his words as a man might search among terrible
weapons for the least deadly.

"When I wrote and asked you to marry me, I said I should come
to-night and receive your answer from your own lips. If your
answer had been different, I should never have spoken to you of my
past. It would not have been my duty. I should not have had the
right. I repeat, Isabel, that until you had confessed your love
for me, I should have had no right to speak to you about my past.
But now there is something you ought to be told at once."

She glanced up quickly with a rebuking smile. How could he wander
so far from the happiness of moments too soon to end? What was his
past to her?

He went on more guardedly.

"Ever since I have loved you, I have realized what I should have to
tell you if you ever returned my love. Sometimes duty has seemed
one thing, sometimes another. This is why I have waited so
long--more than two years; the way was not clear. Isabel, it will
never be clear. I believe now it is wrong to tell you; I believe
It is wrong not to tell you. I have thought and thought--it is
wrong either way. But the least wrong to you and to myself--that
is what I have always tried to see, and as I understand my duty,
now that you are willing to unite your life with mine, there is
something you must know."

He added the last words as though he had reached a difficult
position and were announcing his purpose to hold it. But he paused
gloomily again.

She had scarcely heard him through wonderment that he could so
change at such a moment. Her happiness began to falter and darken
like departing sunbeams. She remained for a space uncertain of
herself, knowing neither what was needed nor what was best; then
she spoke with resolute deprecation:

"Why discuss with me your past life? Have I not known you always?"

These were not the words of girlhood. She spoke from the emotions
of womanhood, beginning to-night in the plighting of her troth.

"You have trusted me too much, Isabel."

Repulsed a second time, she now fixed her large eyes upon him with
surprise. The next moment she had crossed lightly once more the
widening chasm.

"Rowan," she said more gravely and with slight reproach, "I have
not waited so long and then not kn