marry you," she said.

Sec.6

Mr. Brumley leant back, then he bent forward in a desperate attitude
with his hands and arms thrust between his knees, then suddenly he
recovered, stood up and then knelt with one knee upon the seat. "What
are you going to do with me then?" he asked.

"I want you to go on being my friend."

"I can't."

"You can't?"

"No,--I've _hoped_."

And then with something almost querulous in his voice, he repeated, "My
dear, I want you to marry me and I want now nothing else in the world."

She was silent for a moment. "Mr. Brumley," she said, looking up at him,
"have you no thought for our Hostels?"

Mr. Brumley as I have said hated dilemmas. He started to his feet, a man
stung. He stood in front of her and quivered extended hands at her.
"What do such things matter," he cried, "when a man is in love?"

She shrank a little from him. "But," she asked, "haven't they always
mattered?"

"Yes," he expostulated; "but these Hostels, these Hostels.... We've
started them--isn't that good enough? We've set them going...."

"Do you know," she asked, "what would happen to the hostels if I were to
marry?"

"They would go on," he said.

"They would go to a committee. Named. It would include Mrs. Pembrose....
Don't you see what would happen? He understood the case so well...."

Mr. Brumley seemed suddenly shrunken. "He understood too well," he said.

He looked down at her soft eyes, at her drooping gracious form, and it
seemed to him that indeed she was made for love and that it was
unendurable that she should be content to think of friendship and
freedom as the ultimate purposes of her life....

Sec.7

Presently these two were walking in the pine-woods beyond the garden and
Mr. Brumley was discoursing lamentably of love, this great glory that
was denied them.

The shade of perplexity deepened in her dark eyes as she listened. Ever
and again she seemed about to speak and then checked herself and let him
talk on.

He spoke of the closeness of love and the deep excitement of love and
how it filled the soul with pride and the world with wonder, and of the
universal right of men and women to love. He told of his dreams and his
patience, and of the stormy hopes that would not be suppressed when he
heard that Sir Isaac was dead. And as he pictured to himself the lost
delights at which he hinted, as he called back those covert
expectations, he forgot that she had declared herself resolved up