t is now, as
much as we want, and more, a great deal more, than we deserve or we
expected! Why, I'll marry you now, Pauline, and you'll keep me steady;
you and the travel and all the strangeness and the glory of it. You
don't need any educating, any furbishing up--thank Heaven you were
always a lady!--but we'll go abroad, of course, for a while and I'll
show you Paris, Pauline, Paris, where you told Father Rielle you wanted
to go and act; and you shall buy all you want at the shops, and I'll
take you to the Louvre. Oh, yes, and you must go and see Mme.
Bernhardt if she is acting; you might have been her rival if you'd
begun earlier, with your moods and fancies and tempers. Then we'll
come back to London, and I'll take you for a day to my old lodgings in
Jermyn St., just to square up things. Then we'll progress quietly to
the Towers, Langmere, Suffolk; that's the estate; not the most
interesting of counties, but everything will be new and equally
interesting to you, and thus we'll sober down to the regulation old
English married couple. Dost like the picture, my lady of St. Ignace,
my _chatelaine_ of Clairville?"

"Always Clairville, always St. Ignace." She clasped her hands above
her head in weariness. "If something could happen like what you
describe, but no--it is impossible. They say that Henry's sight is
going now, that very soon he will not be able to walk about by himself
at all, that he is better in body but worse in mind, that he is
forgetting all caution and speaking openly of the child--what is to be
the end of it?"

"If anything could happen! Something _has_ happened. What I am
telling you is true. I am rich, able to take care of you, to put an
end to this sordid existence; you shall be taken away from Henry and
the child, and the old associations. Don't you believe me?"

"I should like to; but it's too much, too sudden, too good to be true."

"But it _is_ true; here are the letters; here is money, a little of
what is due, and here are the poems. You see, even if there were any
mistake, any hitch about the estate, I still have a career open to me.
There's an old manuscript novel of mine lying about somewhere; I
believe I can get that taken; and I feel, I know there's something in
it,--life, truth, suffering! But there's no hitch, no mistake, I swear
it to you, Pauline; and whenever you're ready, I am; and we will, in
melodramatic language, fly together from these dreary wilds.
Fortunately