er
what I have begun to do. If I began to talk of it before, I should lose
all heart for it. Kiss me good luck!"

She kissed him enough for all the luck in the world, and then he got
himself out of her arms while she still hardly knew what to make of it
all. He was half-way down the house-stairs, when her eye fell on the
prompt-book. She caught it up and ran out upon the landing, and screamed
down after him, "Brice, Brice! You've forgotten something."

He came flying back, breathless, and she held the book out to him. "Oh,
I don't want that," he panted, "It would damage the play with a manager
to know that Godolphin had rejected it."

"But do you think it would be quite right--quite frank--to let him take
it without telling him?"

"It will be right to show it him without telling him. It will be time
enough to tell him if he likes it."

"That is true," she assented, and then she kissed him again and let him
go; he stood a step below her, and she had to stoop a good deal; but she
went in doors, looking up to him as if he were a whole flight of steps
above her, and saying to herself that he had always been so good and
wise that she must now simply trust him in everything.

Louise still had it on her conscience to offer Maxwell reparation for
the wrong she thought she had done him when she had once decided that he
was too self-seeking and self-centred, and had potentially rejected him
on that ground. The first thing she did after they became engaged was to
confess the wrong, and give him a chance to cast her off if he wished;
but this never seemed quite reparation enough, perhaps because he
laughed and said that she was perfectly right about him, and must take
him with those faults or not at all. She now entered upon a long,
delightful review of his behavior ever since that moment, and she found
that, although he was certainly as self-centred as she had ever thought
or he had owned himself to be, self-seeking he was not, in any mean or
greedy sense. She perceived that his self-seeking, now, at least, was as
much for her sake as his own, and that it was really after all not
self-seeking, but the helpless pursuit of aims which he was born into
the world to achieve. She had seen that he did not stoop to achieve
them, but had as haughty a disdain of any but the highest means as she
could have wished him to have, and much haughtier than she could have
had in his place. If he forgot her in them, he forgot himself quite as