nough!

"You are not vexed with your pupil--are you?" she resumed, again
looking up in his face, this time with a rosy flush on her own.

"Why?" said Donal, with wonder.

"For speaking so to my master."

"Angry because you love me?"

"No, of course!" she responded, at once satisfied. "You knew that must
be! How could I but love you--better than any one else in the world!
You have given me life! I was dead.--You have been like another father
to me!" she added, with a smile of heavenly tenderness. "But I could
not have spoken to you like this, if I had not known I was dying."

The word shot a sting as of fire through Donal's heart.

"You are always a child, Mr. Grant," she went on; "death is making a
child of me; it makes us all children: as if we were two little
children together, I tell you I love you.--Don't look like that," she
continued; "you must not forget what you have been teaching me all this
time--that the will of God, the perfect God, is all in all! He is not a
God far off: to know that is enough to have lived for! You have taught
me that, and I love you with a true heart fervently."

Donal could not speak. He knew she was dying.

"Mr. Grant," she began again, "my soul is open to his eyes, and is not
ashamed. I know I am going to do what would by the world be counted
unwomanly; but you and I stand before our Father, not before the world.
I ask you in plain words, knowing that if you cannot do as I ask you
willingly, you will not do it. And be sure I shall plainly be dying
before I claim the fulfilment of your promise if you give it. I do not
want your answer all at once: you must think about it."

Here she paused a while, then said,

"I want you to marry me, if you will, before I go."

Donal could not yet speak. His soul was in a tumult of emotion.

"I am tired," she said. "Please go and think it over. If you say no, I
shall only say, 'He knows best what is best!' I shall not be ashamed.
Only you must not once think what the world would say: of all people we
have nothing to do with the world! We have nothing to do but with God
and love! If he be pleased with us, we can afford to smile at what his
silly children think of us: they mind only what their vulgar nurses
say, not what their perfect father says: we need not mind them--need
we?--I wonder at myself," she went on, for Donal did not utter a word,
"for being able to speak like this; but then I have been thinking of it
for a long time--chiefly