rriage will best contribute
to my own happiness. I do not think, dearest, that it would mar
yours.'

This was said with so quiet a voice and so placid a demeanour, that
the words, though they were too plain to be misunderstood, hardly at
first brought themselves home to her. Of course he had renewed his
offer of marriage, but he had done so in a tone which almost made her
feel that the proposition could not be an earnest one. It was not that
she believed that he was joking with her or paying her a poor insipid
compliment. When she thought about it at all, she knew that it could
not be so. But the thing was so improbable! Her opinion of herself was
so poor, she had become so sick of her own vanities and littlenesses
and pretences, that she could not understand that such a man as this
should in truth want to make her his wife. At this moment she thought
less of herself and more of Mr Broune than either perhaps deserved.
She sat silent, quite unable to look him in the face, while he kept
his place in his arm-chair, lounging back, with his eyes intent on her
countenance. 'Well,' he said; 'what do you think of it? I never loved
you better than I did for refusing me before, because I thought that
you did so because it was not right that I should be embarrassed by
your son.'

'That was the reason,' she said, almost in a whisper.

'But I shall love you better still for accepting me now if you will
accept me.'

The long vista of her past life appeared before her eyes. The ambition
of her youth which had been taught to look only to a handsome
maintenance, the cruelty of her husband which had driven her to run
from him, the further cruelty of his forgiveness when she returned to
him; the calumny which had made her miserable, though she had never
confessed her misery; then her attempts at life in London, her
literary successes and failures, and the wretchedness of her son's
career;--there had never been happiness, or even comfort, in any of it.
Even when her smiles had been sweetest her heart had been heaviest.
Could it be that now at last real peace should be within her reach,
and that tranquillity which comes from an anchor holding to a firm
bottom? Then she remembered that first kiss,--or attempted kiss,--when,
with a sort of pride in her own superiority, she had told herself that
the man was a susceptible old goose. She certainly had not thought
then that his susceptibility was of this nature. Nor could she quite
understa