sters--give me yours. I will cherish them as any
brother could. Come and enrich my life; you shall still fill and shelter
theirs. I dare not think what my future might be with you to guide, to
inspire, to bless--dare not, lest with a word you should plunge me into
an outer darkness I cannot face.'

He caught her unresisting hand, and raised it to his lips.

'Is there no sacredness,' he said brokenly, 'in the fate that has
brought us together--out of all the world--here in this lonely valley?
Come to me, Catherine. You shall never fail the old ties, I promise you;
and new hands shall cling to you--new voices shall call you blessed.'

Catherine could hardly breathe. Every word had been like balm upon a
wound--like a ray of intense light in the gloom about them. Oh, where
was this softness bearing her--this emptiness of all will, of all
individual power? She hid her eyes with her other hand, struggling to
recall that far away moment in Marrisdale. But the mind refused to work.
Consciousness seemed to retain nothing but the warm grasp of his
hand--the tones of his voice.

He saw her struggle, and pressed on remorselessly.

'Speak to me--say one little kind word. Oh, you cannot send me away
miserable and empty!'

She turned to him, and laid her trembling free hand on his arm. He
clasped them both with rapture.

'Give me a little time.'

'No, no,' he said, and it almost seemed to her that he was smiling:
'time for you to escape me again, my wild mountain bird; time for you to
think yourself and me into all sorts of moral mists! No, you shall not
have it. Here, alone with God and the dark--bless me or undo me. Send me
out to the work of life maimed and sorrowful, or send me out your
knight, your possession, pledged----'

But his voice failed him. What a note of youth, of imagination, of
impulsive eagerness there was through it all! The more slowly-moving
inarticulate nature was swept away by it. There was but one object clear
to her in the whole world of thought or sense, everything else had sunk
out of sight--drowned in a luminous mist.

He rose and stood before her as he delivered his ultimatum, his tall
form drawn up to its full height. In the east, across the valley, above
the farther buttress of High Fell, there was a clearer strip of sky,
visible for a moment among the moving storm clouds, and a dim haloed
moon shone out in it. Far away a white-walled cottage glimmered against
the fell; the pools at their fee