If two lives join, there is oft a scar. --ROBERT BROWNING.

Rachel left Westhope Abbey the day after Lord Newhaven's funeral, and
returned to London. And the day after that Hugh came to see her, and
proposed, and was accepted.

He had gone over in his mind a hundred times all that he should say to
her on that occasion. If he had said all that he was fully resolved to
say, it is hardly credible that any woman, however well disposed towards
him, would have accepted so tedious a suitor. But what he really said,
in a hoarse, inaudible voice, was, "Rachel, will you marry me?" He was
looking so intently into a little grove of Roman hyacinths, that perhaps
the hyacinths heard what he said; at any rate, she did not. But she
supposed, from long experience, that he was proposing, and she said
"Yes" immediately.

She had not intended to say so--at least, not at first. She had made up
her mind that it would be only right to inform him that she was fourteen
months older than he (she had looked him out in Burke where she herself
was not to be found); that she was "old enough to be his mother"; also
that she was of a cold, revengeful temper not calculated to make a home
happy, and several other odious traits of character which she had never
dreamed of confiding to any of the regiment of her previous lovers.

But the only word she had breath to say when the time came was "Yes."

* * * * *

Rachel had shivered and hesitated on the brink of a new love long
enough. Her anxiety about Hugh had unconsciously undermined her
resistance. His confession had given her instantly the confidence in him
which had been wanting. It is not perfection that we look for in our
fellow-creatures, but for what is apparently rarer, a little plain
dealing.

How they rise before us!--the sweet reproachful faces of those whom we
could have loved devotedly if they had been willing to be
straightforward with us; whom we have lost, not by our own will, but by
that paralysis of feeling which gradually invades the heart at the
discovery of small insincerities. Sincerity seems our only security
against losing those who love us, the only cup in which those who are
worth keeping will care to pledge us when youth is past.

Rachel was not by nature _de celles qui se jettent dans l'amour comme
dans un precipice_. But she shut her eyes, recommended her soul to God,
and threw herself over. She had climbed down once--with assistan