, and then fell before his earnest gaze. She
coloured a little.

"I am quite sure that I mean to accept Sir John's proposal," she said,
with a little uneasy laugh.

"Child, do you love him?"

Her eyes met his again; there was a vague trouble in them. The man had a
power over her, the power of sheer goodness of soul. She could never be
untrue to herself with Eustace Daintree; she was always at her very best
with him, humble and gentle; and she could no more have told him a lie,
or put him off with vague conventionalities, than she could have
committed a deadly sin.

What is it about some people that, in spite of ourselves, they thus force
out of us the best part of our nature; that base and unworthy thoughts
cannot live in us before them,--that they melt out of our hearts as the
snow before the rays of the sun? Even though the effect may be transient,
such is the power of their faith, and their truth, and their goodness,
that it must needs call forth in us something of the same spirit as their
own.

Such was Eustace Daintree's influence over Vera. It was not because of
his office, for no one was less susceptible than Vera--a Protestant
brought up, with but vague ideas of her own faith, in a Catholic land--to
any of those recognized associations with which a purely English-bred
girl might have felt the character of the clergyman of the parish where
she lived to be invested. It was nothing of that sort that made him great
to her; it was, simply and solely, the goodness of the man that impressed
her. His guilelessness, his simplicity of mind, his absolute uprightness
of character, and, with it all, the absence in him of any assumption of
authority, or of any superiority of character over those about him. His
very humility made her humble with him, and exalted him into something
saintly in her eyes.

When Eustace looked at her fixedly, with all his good soul in his earnest
eyes, and said to her again, "Do you love him, Vera?" Vera could but
answer him simply and frankly, almost against her will, as it were.

"I don't think I do, Eustace; but then I do not quite know what love is.
I do not think, however, that it can be what I feel."

"My child, no union can be hallowed without love. Vera, you will not run
into so great a danger?" he said anxiously.

She looked up at him smiling.

"I like him better than any one else, at all events. Better than Mr.
Gisburne, for instance. And I think, I do really think, Eustace, i