y."

"Yet I do."

"And when I was describing her--"

"It was as if I saw her before me."

"I am sorry I said anything about a friend of yours, sir. I had supposed
she was quite a stranger to you."

"Sometimes it seems to me, too, as if she were a stranger," Crane
answered. "Each time I see her, Jane-Ellen, she seems to me so lovely
and wonderful and miraculous that it is as if I saw her for the first
time. Sometimes when I am away from her it seems to me quite ridiculous
to believe that such a creature exists in this rather tiresome old
world, and I feel like rushing back from wherever I am to assure myself
that she isn't just a creation of my own passionate desire. In this
sense, I think she will always be a stranger, always be a surprise to me
even if I should have the great felicity of spending the rest of my days
with her. Does it bore you, Jane-Ellen, to hear me talking this way
about my own feelings?"

Jane-Ellen did not answer; indeed something seemed to suggest that she
could not speak, but she shook her head and Burton went on.

"So you see why it distressed me to hear from so good an authority as
yourself that she had already engaged herself three times. It is not
that I am of a jealous nature, Jane-Ellen, but when I ask her to be my
wife, if she should say yes, I should want to feel sure that that
meant--"

"Oh, Mr. Crane!" said Jane-Ellen, "I said that to make Mr. Reed angry."

"And there was no truth in it?"

There was a pause. Jane-Ellen looked down and wriggled her shoulders a
little.

"Well," she admitted, "there was some truth in it. They were not exactly
engagements. We think in this part of the world that there's something
almost too harsh in a flat no--oh! the truth is," she added, suddenly
changing her tone, "that girls don't know what they're doing until they
find that they have fallen in love themselves."

"And do you think by any chance that this revelation may have come to
Miss Revelly?"

"I know right well it has," answered Jane-Ellen.

"Oh, my dear love!" cried Crane and took her into his arms.

The kitchen clock, loudly ticking, looked down upon them on one side,
and Willoughby, loudly purring, looked up at them from the other, and a
good deal of ticking and purring was done before Claudia broke the
silence by saying, like one to whom a good idea has come rather late:

"But I never said it was through you that the revelation came."

"You mustn't say that it hasn't even i