Page:Maud Howe - A Newport Aquarelle.djvu/52

 when the charm of her presence was removed.

If she was, as she had been that day, almost tender to him, the old conviction, always latent in his mind, that she really loved him, would assert itself, and the feeling that if he chose to exert his will, he could induce her to marry him, would grow into a certainty.

But with this certainty came also the remembrance of the great, insuperable objection to such a step,—that of his limited income, which to her meant poverty.

He knew that to her luxurious nature any enforced economy would be irksome, perhaps intolerable, and feared lest it might imbitter her character, whose selfish impulses he knew so well.

He would not now, with his knowledge of the world and its men and women, beg her to renounce it all, for love and for him.

That he himself was generous to a fault, giving away his money whenever he had any