straightforward promptness, facing death, and all that death could
then mean to him, with a light, half-jaunty courage characteristic
of the ideal soldier. She had a secret wonder at herself that she
could know all this and yet be so vividly conscious that what he
asked could never be. Her womanly pity said yes; her woman's heart
said no. He was eager to take her in his arms, to place the kiss of
life-long loyalty on her lips; but in her very soul she felt that
it would be almost sacrilege for him to touch her; since the divine
impulse to yield, without which there can be no divine sanction,
was absent.

She listened, not as a confused, frightened girl, while he spoke
that which she had guessed before. Other men had sued, although
none had spoken so eloquently or backed their words by such weight
of character. Her trouble, her deep perplexity, was not due to a
mere declaration, but was caused by her inability to answer him.
The conventional words which she would have spoken a few days before
died on her lips. They would be an insult to this earnest man,
who had the right to hope for something better. What was scarcely
worse--for there are few emergencies in which egotism is wholly
lost--she would appear at once to him and to herself in an odious
light. Her course would be well characterized by the Irish servant's
lover, for here was a man who from the very fineness of his nature,
if wronged, might easily go to the devil.

His words echoed her thought, for her hesitation and the visible
distress on her face led him to exclaim, in a voice tense with
something like agony: "O Marian, since you hesitate, hesitate
longer. Think well before you mar--nay, spoil--my life. For God's
sake don't put me off with some of the sham conventionalities current