an, you know,
that I must tell you that--" desperately, "that I am engaged."

"Ah!"

There was a something so sharp and sudden about this exclamation that
Angela turned round quickly.

"What's the matter, have you hurt yourself?"

"Yes; but go on, Angela."

It was an awkward story to tell, especially the George complication
part of it, and to any one else she felt that she would have found it
almost impossible to tell it, but in Mr. Fraser she was, she knew,
sure of a sympathetic listener. Had she known, too, that the mere
mention of her lover's name was a stab to her listener's heart, and
that every expression of her own deep and enduring love and each tone
of endearment were new and ingenious tortures, she might well have
been confused.

For so it was. Although he was fifty years of age, Mr. Fraser had not
educated Angela with impunity. He had paid the penalty that must have
resulted to any heart-whole man not absolutely a fossil, who had been
brought into close contact with such a woman as Angela. Her loveliness
appealed to his sense of beauty, her goodness to his heart, and her
learning to his intellectual sympathies. What wonder that he learnt by
imperceptible degrees to love her; the wonder would have been if he
had not.

The reader need not fear, however; he shall not be troubled with any
long account of Mr. Fraser's misfortune, for it never came to light or
obtruded itself upon the world or even upon its object. His was one of
those earnest, secret, and self-sacrificing passions of which, if we
only knew it, there exist a good many round about us, passions which
to all appearance tend to nothing and are entirely without object,
unless it to be make the individuals on whom they are inflicted a
little less happy, or a little more miserable, as the case may be,
than he or she would otherwise have been. It was to strive to conquer
this passion, which in his heart he called dishonourable, that Mr.
Fraser had gone abroad, right away from Angela, where he had wrestled
with it, and prayed against it, and at last, as he thought, subdued
it. But now, on his first sight of her, it rose again in all its
former strength, and rushed through his being like a storm, and he
realized that such love is of those things that cannot die. And
perhaps it is a question if he really wished to lose it. It was a poor
thing indeed, a very poor thing, but his own. There is something so
divine about all true love that there lurks a