although, alas! you must die for me this morning. But when
I asked you to marry me, indeed, and indeed, it was because I respected
and admired you, and loved you with my whole soul, from the very moment
that you took my part against my uncle. If you had seen yourself, and
how noble you looked, you would pity rather than despise me. And now,"
she went on, hurriedly checking him with her hand, "although I have laid
aside all reserve and told you so much, remember that I know your
sentiments towards me already. I would not, believe me, being nobly
born, weary you with importunities into consent. I too have a pride of
my own: and I declare before the holy Mother of God, if you should now
go back from your word already given, I would no more marry you than I
would marry my uncle's groom."

Denis smiled a little bitterly.

"It is a small love," he said, "that shies at a little pride."

She made no answer, although she probably had her own thoughts.

"Come hither to the window," he said, with a sigh. "Here is the dawn."

And indeed the dawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky was
full of essential daylight, colourless and clean; and the valley
underneath was flooded with a grey reflection. A few thin vapours clung
in the coves of the forest or lay along the winding course of the river.
The scene disengaged a surprising effect of stillness, which was hardly
interrupted when the cocks began once more to crow among the steadings.
Perhaps the same fellow who had made so horrid a clangour in the
darkness not half an hour before now sent up the merriest cheer to greet
the coming day. A little wind went bustling and eddying among the
tree-tops underneath the windows. And still the daylight kept flooding
insensibly out of the east, which was soon to grow incandescent and cast
up that red-hot cannon-ball, the rising sun.

Denis looked out over all this with a bit of a shiver. He had taken her
hand, and retained it in his almost unconsciously.

"Has the day begun already?" she said; and then, illogically enough:
"the night has been so long! Alas! what shall we say to my uncle when he
returns?"

"What you will," said Denis, and he pressed her fingers in his.

She was silent.

"Blanche," he said, with a swift, uncertain, passionate utterance, "you
have seen whether I fear death. You must know well enough that I would
as gladly leap out of that window into the empty air as lay a finger on
you without your free and full