ed to think better of it.

"I am wrong to ask you, Marion; I am selfish, I ought not even wish you
to share my lot."

She asked him why, raising her sweet eyes to his face.

"Why, because when you go out into the great world peers and princes
will woo you, my darling; the noblest in the land will sue for your
favor, and you, who might have been a duchess, will repent loving and
caring for one so poor and obscure as I am. I can give you no title."

"You can give me what I value more," she said. "You can give me true and
disinterested love."

He did not forget his sister's advice, that he should have that promise
in writing. One evening--it was August then, when the fruit hung ripe on
the trees--he told her, with many sighs, that he should not see her
again for some days.

"How am I to live through them, Marion, I do not know; now when I wake,
my first thought is that I shall see you; all the world seems so fair
and life so bright, because I shall see you. What will happen to me when
the morning sun brings no such delight?"

She was young and simple enough to feel very much touched with his
words; the old idea of having his life in her hands never left her.

"Grant me a favor," he said. "I shall have no energy for work unless you
promise it: Write to me every night and in your letters tell me, sweet,
that which I love best to hear, that you will marry me."

So to make him happy, to give him life and energy for his work, she
wrote to him every evening, and, remembering his request, in each one of
those letters she repeated her promise to marry him.

This is no overstrained story, it is no exaggeration; hundreds of men
have acted as Allan Lyster did, and hundreds will act so in the future.
When girls have once mastered the grand lesson that all secrecy--all
concealment is wrong, they will have taken the only precaution possible
to save themselves.

So matters went on until the continued secrecy began to prey upon
Marion's mind; then she made an appeal to Allan with which our story
opens. He did his best to argue with her, and he sent a note to his
sister, telling her the bright, bonnie bird they had ensnared was
growing restive under constraint.

No doubts ever came to her. Youth is the age of romance; youth
imperatively demands love and poetry. She had found both and was
perfectly satisfied. She believed honestly that she loved him very
dearly; it never occurred to her that the greatest charm really was the