"You must wait," said he.

"For four years?" asked Herbert.

"You must wait,--as I did," said Papa Heine. "I was forty before I
could marry." Papa Heine, however, should not have forgotten to say
that his bride was only twenty, and that if he had waited, she had
not.

"Isa," Herbert said to her, when all this had been fully explained
to her, "what do you say now?"

"Of course it is all over," said she, very calmly.

"Oh, Isa, is that your love?"

"No, Herbert, that is not my love; that is my discretion;" and she
even laughed with her mild low laughter, as she answered him. "You
know you are too impatient to wait four years, and what else
therefore can I say?"

"I wonder whether you love me?" said Herbert, with a grand look of
injured sentiment.

"Well; in your sense of the word I do not think I do. I do not love
you so that I need make every one around us unhappy because
circumstances forbid me to marry you. That sort of love would be
baneful."

"Ah no, you do not know what love means!"