way."

"You mean you'd marry somebody else in the process of time."

"No, Walter; I don't mean that. Women shouldn't make protestations;
but I don't think I ever should. But a woman can live and get on very
well without being married, and I should always have you in my heart,
and I should try to comfort myself with remembering that you had
loved me."

"I am quite sure that I shall never marry anyone else," said the
Captain.

"You know what I'm driving at now;--eh, Walter?"

"Partly."

"I want you to know wholly. I told you this morning that I should
leave it to you to decide. I still say the same. I consider myself
for the present as much bound to obey you as though I were your wife
already. But after saying that, and after hearing Aunt Mary's sermon,
I felt that I ought to make you understand that I am quite aware
that it may be impossible for you to keep to your engagement. You
understand all that better than I do. Our engagement was made when
you thought you had money, and even then you felt that there was
little enough."

"It was very little."

"And now there is none. I don't profess to be afraid of poverty
myself, because I don't quite know what it means."

"It means something very unpleasant."

"No doubt; and it would be unpleasant to be parted;--wouldn't it?"

"It would be horrible."

She pressed his arm again as she went on. "You must judge between the
two. What I want you to understand is this, that whatever you may
judge to be right and best, I will agree to it, and will think that
it is right and best. If you say that we will get ourselves married
and try it, I shall feel that not to get ourselves married and not to
try it is a manifest impossibility; and if you say that we should be
wrong to get married and try it, then I will feel that to have done
so was quite a manifest impossibility."

"Mary," said he, "you're an angel."

"No; but I'm a woman who loves well enough to be determined not to
hurt the man she loves if she can help it."

"There is one thing on which I think we must decide."

"What is that?"

"I must at any rate go out before we are married." Mary Lowther felt
this to be a decision in her favour,--to be a decision which for the
time made her happy and light-hearted. She had so dreaded a positive
and permanent separation, that the delay seemed to her to be hardly
an evil.

CHAPTER XXXII.

MR. GILMORE'S SUCCESS.

Harry Gilmore, the prosperous country gentleman