but I can't help. I have hardly slept at night, in trying to get
rid of the doubt. When you opened the door, I felt you didn't welcome
me. Don't you think of me as a burden? I can't help wondering why I am
here.'

He took hold of her left hand, and looked at it, then said playfully:

'Of course you wonder. What business has a wife to come and see her
husband without the ring on her finger?'

Nancy turned from him, opened the front of her dress, unknotted a string
of silk, and showed her finger bright with the golden circlet.

'That's how I must wear it, except when I am with you. I keep
touching--to make sure it's there.'

Tarrant kissed her fingers.

'Dear,'--she had her face against him--'make me certain that you love
me. Speak to me like you did before. Oh, I never knew in my life what it
was to feel ashamed!'

'Ashamed? Because you are married, Nancy?'

'Am I really married? That seems impossible. It's like having dreamt
that I was married to you. I can hardly remember a thing that happened.'

'The registry at Teignmouth remembers,' he answered with a laugh. 'Those
books have a long memory.'

She raised her eyes.

'But wouldn't you undo it if you could?--No, no, I don't mean that. Only
that if it had never happened--if we had said good-bye before those last
days--wouldn't you have been glad now?'

'Why, that's a difficult question to answer,' he returned gently. 'It
all depends on your own feeling.'

For whatever reason, these words so overcame Nancy that she burst into
tears. Tarrant, at once more lover-like, soothed and fondled her, and
drew her to sit on his knee.

'You're not like your old self, dear girl. Of course, I can understand
it. And your father's illness. But you mustn't think of it in this way.
I do love you, Nancy. I couldn't unsay a word I said to you--I don't
wish anything undone.'

'Make me believe that. I think I should be quite happy then. It's the
hateful thought that perhaps you never wanted me for your wife; it
_will_ come, again and again, and it makes me feel as if I would rather
have died.'

'Send such thoughts packing. Tell them your husband wants all your heart
and mind for himself.'

'But will you never think ill of me?'

She whispered the words, close-clinging.

'I should be a contemptible sort of brute.'

'No. I ought to have--. If we had spoken of our love to each other, and
waited.'

'A very proper twelvemonth's engagement,--meetings at five o'clock
tea,-