"Why?"

"I might give you back your freedom. I have only to leave this
place, and your uncle would be satisfied, and you would be
relieved from all the cares that are pressing on you now."

"Don't speak of it, Eustace! If you want me to forget my cares,
say you love me more dearly than ever."

He said it in a kiss. We had a moment of exquisite forgetfulness
of the hard ways of life--a moment of delicious absorption in
each other. I came back to realities fortified and composed,
rewarded for all that I had gone through, ready to go through it
all over again for another kiss. Only give a woman love, and
there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.

"No, they have done with objecting. They have remembered at last
that I am of age, and that I can choose for myself. They have
been pleading with me, Eustace, to give you up. My aunt, whom I
thought rather a hard woman, has been crying--for the first time
in my experience of her. My uncle, always kind and good to me,
has been kinder and better than ever. He has told me that if I
persist in becoming your wife, I shall not be deserted on my
wedding-day. Wherever we may marry, he will be there to read the
service, and my aunt will go to the church with me. But he
entreats me to consider seriously what I am doing--to consent to
a separation from you for a time--to consult other people on my
position toward you, if I am not satisfied with his opinion. Oh,
my darling, they are as anxious to part us as if you were the