hat he thought she heard it for the first
time.

Lifting her eyebrows in pretty incredulity. "Not really?" she said.

"It is true," he cried with fierce emphasis.

At that she looked grave.

He had been trying to make her serious; but no sooner did he see her
look of light and joy pass into a look of thought than he was filled
with that sort of acute misery which differs from other sorrows as acute
pain differs from duller aches.

"My darling," he said, his heart was wrung with the words--"my darling,
if I have hurt you, I have almost killed myself." (Man that he was, he
believed that his life must ebb in this pain.)

"Why?" she asked. "How?"

He went a step nearer her, but as it came to him every moment more
clearly that he had deceived her, as he realised what he had gained and
what he now thought to forego, his voice forsook him in his effort to
speak. Words that he tried to say died on his lips.

But she saw that he had tried to say that because of it she should not
marry him.

He tried again to speak and made better work of it. "This that has come
to us--this love that has taken us both--you will say it is not enough
to--to--"

She lifted up her face to him. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes were
full of light. "This that has come to us, Alec--" (At his name he came
nearer yet) "this that has taken us both" (she faltered) "is enough."

He came near to her again; he took her hands into his; and all that he
felt and all that she felt, passed from his eyes to hers, from hers to
his.

He said, "It seems like talking in church, but common things must be
said and answered, and--Sophie--what will your father say?"

"I don't know," she said; but happiness made her playful; she stroked
the sleeve of his coat, as if to touch it were of more interest to her.
"I will give him my fortune to make up, and come to you penniless."

"He won't consent," he urged.

There was still a honeyed carelessness in her voice and look. "At the
great age to which I have attained," said she, "fathers don't
interfere."

"What can I do or say," he said, "to make you consider?" for it seemed
to him that her thoughts and voice came from her spellbound in some
strange delight, as the murmur comes from a running stream, without
meaning, except the meaning of all beautiful and happy things in God's
world.

"What must I consider?"

"The shop--the trade."

"When you were a very young butcher, and first took to it, did you like
i