"You would!" and his voice was low and tense. "_You!_--you would
actually marry me?"

She, rising likewise, confronted him in all her fresh and youthful
beauty, fair and smiling, her bosom heaving and her eyes dilating with
eagerness.

"I would,--indeed I would!" she averred delightedly. "I would rather
marry you than any man in the world!"

There was a moment's silence. Then--

"Why?" he asked.

The simple monosyllabic query completely confused her. It was
unexpected, and she was at her wit's end how to reply to it. Moreover,
he kept his eyes so pertinaciously fixed upon her that she felt her
blood rising to her cheeks and brow in a hot flush of--shame? Oh
no!--not shame, but merely petulant vexation. The proper way for him to
behave at this juncture, so she reflected, would be that he should take
her tenderly in his arms and murmur, after the penny-dreadful style of
elderly hero, "My darling, my darling! Can you, so young and beautiful,
really care for an old fogey like me?'" to which she would, of course,
have replied in the same fashion, and with the most charming
insincerity--"Dearest! Do not talk of age! You will never be old to my
fond heart!" But to stand, as he was standing, like a rigid figure of
bronze, with a hard pale face in which only the eyes seemed living, and
to merely ask "Why" she would rather marry him than any other man in the
world, was absurd, to say the least of it, and indeed quite lacking in