s--his life and honour were
engaged; and this cause and his part in it had been for long hampered,
and all his clearness of vision and judgment dimmed by the pressure of a
number of difficulties and worries he could not have discussed with
her--worries practical and financial, connected with the _Clarion_, with
the experiments he had been carrying out on his estate, and with other
troublesome matters. He had felt a thousand times that his fortunes,
political or private, were too doubtful and perilous to allow him to ask
any woman to share them.--Then, again, he had seen her--and his
resolution, his scruple, had melted in his breast!

Well! there were still troubles in front! But he was no longer cowed by
them. In spite of them, he dared now to throw himself at her feet, to
ask her to come and share a life of combat and of labour, to bring her
beauty and her mind to the joint conduct of a great enterprise. To _her_
a man might show his effort and his toil,--from _her_ he might claim a
sympathy it would be vain to ask of any smaller woman.

Then suddenly he broke down. Speech seemed to fail him. Only his
eyes--more intense and piercing under their straight brows than she had
ever known them--beseeched her--his hand sought hers.

She meanwhile sat in a trance of agitation, mistress neither of reason
nor of feeling. She felt his spell, as she had always done. The woman in
her thrilled at last to the mere name and neighbourhood of love. The
heart in her cried out that pain and loss could only be deadened so--the
past could only be silenced by filling the present with movement and
warm life.

Yet what tremors of conscience--what radical distrust of herself and
him! And the first articulate words she found to say to him were very
much what she had said to Aldous so long ago--only filled with a
bitterer and more realised content.

"After all, what do we know of each other! You don't know me--not as I
am. And I feel--"

"Doubts?" he said, smiling. "Do you imagine that that seems anything but
natural to me? _I_ can have none; but _you_--After all, we are not quite
boy and girl, you and I; we have lived, both of us! But ask
yourself--has not destiny brought us together? Think of it all!"

Their eyes met again. Hers sank under the penetration, the flame of his.
Yet, throughout, he was conscious of the doorway to his right, of the
figures incessantly moving across it. His own eloquence had convinced
and moved himself abundan